Rapid Simulation of Urban Traffic using FPGAs

Microscopic simulation of complex traffic models can take hours or even days on simulators build to run on a single processor machine. These simulators use continuous models for traffic movement. In this report, we introduce a discrete simulation system that models individual vehicles. Although we have abandoned the notion of continuous movement of vehicles, we achieve highly accurate results gained from our simulations of a road-merge bottleneck and a signalized junction. Our eventual target simulation platform is field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) which allow us to construct arbitrary random logic circuits. Discrete modelling is essential for efficient implementation on such devices. This paper describes preliminary work towards simulating road networks at high speed directly in hardware.