Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6
A Simulation of All of Switzerland
One of the current main goals in our group is a simulation of “all of Switzerland”. By this
we mean a microscopic 24h simulation of a typical workday of all traffic in Switzerland.
Fig. 4 contains an early result of this.
Fig. 4.
Most of Switzerland at 8am, simulation result. The graphics shows individual vehicles, but
they are so small that they cannot be distinguished. Areas in dark contain traffic jams.
The network that is used was originally developed for the Swiss regional planning
authority (Bundesamt fur Raumentwicklung), and has since been modified by Vrtic at
the IVT and by us. The network has the fairly typical number of 10 572 nodes and
28 622 links. Also fairly typical, the major attributes on these links are type, length,
speed, and capacity.
Demand is obtained from a 24-hour origin-destination matrix with 3066 zones, also
from the Bundesamt fur Raumentwicklung. This matrix is converted to 24 separate
hourly matrices by a several-step heuristic. In the long run, it is intended to move to
activity-based demand generation. Then, as explained above one would start from a
synthetic population, and for each population member, one would generate the chain of
activities for the whole 24-hour period.
Routes are obtained via iterations between simulation and time-dependent fastest
path routing. The simulation behind Fig. 4 is the queue simulation as described in Sec. 5.
