Distributed/parallel traffic simulation for IVHS applications
Paul T. R. Wang, William P. Niedringhaus · 1993
This paper presents two algorithms developed for a distributed, discrete-event, and object-oriented traffic simulation, such as the Traffic and Highway Objects for REsearch, Analysis, and Understanding (THOREAU) (McGurrin and Wang, 1991) and (Hsin and Wang, 1992).THOREAU was designed for the study and analysis of Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS) [1] applications.The purpose of using distributed processing for traffic simulation is to extend the scope which can be modeled at an individual vehicle behavior level, by significantly increasing execution speed.The first algorithm was derived to decompose a large traffic model into submodels distributed over a network of workst ations, with a minimum amount of inter-processor interactions, and to achieve the highest degree of parallelism.The second algorithm is an improvement of the Floyd algorithm for finding shortest paths using submodel decomposition and node to arc incidency to achieve a 10m3fold speed improvement using m distributed processors.Both algorithms are being implemented for IVHS-related applications in a new version of THOREAU.