Pushing the limits: A concept of a parallel microsimulation framework

Abstract

This paper describes the concept of a versatile transport simulation framework to be used for the development of integrated transport simulation models. It is designed to improve modularization and thereby simplify the collaboration between scientists and engineers from different fields. Modularization is believed to be important due to the increasing complexity of the implementation task if models from different areas are to be integrated. In performance critical software projects this complexity is often further increased by the desire or the need for an implementation that can be run in parallel on multiple processors. Furthermore, developing an efficient parallel simulation is not trivial. In addition to the complexity of the modeling task as such one has to deal with communication delays and data availability issues. The idea of the presented framework is to handle this complexity by defining simple rules according to which user developed modules must act. These rules include certain minimum delays between the observation of a change in the system and the triggered reactions, limited vision, and limited traveling speed. To illustrate how the framework is to be used a simples modeling scenario is created and a possible implementation employing the framework is sketched. The example scenario consists of the integration of a pedestrian simulation with a load estimation module and a travel time estimator. Finally, an outlook on the next steps in the development of the framework is given.