MacroSim: A macroscopic Mobsim for MATSim

Abstract

The simulation of large-scale scenarios requires high-performance simulations. MATSim, an agent-based transport simulation, is increasingly reaching limits. The traditional approach is to scale the scenarios, i.e. simulating only 10% of a population instead of 100%. This paper suggests MacroSim, a macroscopic mobility simulation module for MATSim, to overcome the current performance limits within MATSim. It uses volume-delay functions to estimate travel times for links based on experienced usages of these links. This allows to decouple agents and thus allows a parallelization of the mobility simulation within MATSim per design. A preliminary implementation of MacroSim showed promising results (7 to 50 times faster than the current mobility simulation depending on the scenario size). Given its limitations, first of all no back propagation of traffic congestion, MacroSim is suggested as a complementary mobility simulation to the current implementation for cases where scenario size and simulation performance are more important than precise traffic dynamics.