Abstract
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 per- formance 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 - most important 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.
Highlights
MATSim is an activity-based multi-agent simulation framework
It has been possible to deal with scenarios of up to the order of 107 agents. Even if this is in itself an achievement of the project, it cannot be denied that such large scale scenarios are associated with very long computation times
These are manageable in a MATSim development context but not necessarily compatible with practical use in transport research, unless a supercomputer is available to the modeler
Summary
MATSim is an activity-based multi-agent simulation framework. It is designed for large-scale scenarios. Among the MATSim main components, the transport simulation module (so called ”mobsim”) requires in its current implementation Horni et al (2016a) a substantial part of the necessary computation time It appears as one of the modules where speed gains would have an impact. Instead of the widely used approaches (including the current implementation of the mobsim) which require the concurrent simulation of the whole model environment (systembased), in MacroSim the interactions of one agent with all the others are not explicitly modeled. They are represented at a higher abstraction level through constraints in road capacity and speed on any given road section of the network, expressed by volume-delay functions.
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