Distributed traffic simulation: technical report no. DCSE/TR-2008-02

The road traffic density on highways and especially in cities is permanently increasing. An important tool, which can be used for analysis and controlling of traffic networks, is the computer simulation. However, in order to be performed in suitable time, a detailed simulation of a large traffic network (e.g. whole city) requires a great amount of computational power. A way how to obtain sufficient power for the simulation is to adapt it for distributed computing environment. In this work, the common issues of distributed traffic simulation are discussed. Because on of the main bottlenecks of every distribut ed application is the communication among its particular processes, we focus mainly on inter-process communication. Besides the description of commonly used approaches, we present also several modifications to the communication protocol, which cause significant reduction of inter-process communication. The resulting communication pr otocol has been tested on the Java Urban Traffic Simulator (JUTS), which is being developed at our department. However, in final stage, our communication protocol will be applicable for general time-stepped simulations. The results of the tests, which have been so far performed, are also presented in this work