Methods for Division of Road Traffic Networks Focused on Load-Balancing

Abstract

The road traffic simulat ion is an important tool for analysis and control of road traffic networks. In order to be able to simu late very large traffic networks in a reasonable time, it is possible to use a d istributed computing environ ment. There, the co mbined power of mu ltiple interconnected computers is utilized. During the adaptation of the simulat ion for the distributed environment, it is necessary to divide the traffic network into sub-networks, which are then simulated on par- ticular nodes of the distributed computer. The load-balancing of the sub-networks and the communication between them are two key issues. In this paper, we compare the methods for traffic network division, wh ich we developed. The methods are focused on load-balancing and consist of two steps - assigning of weights to the traffic lanes and the marking of traffic lanes, which shall be div ided. For the first step, traffic simulat ions of different level of detail are utilized. For the second step, a modified breadth-first search algorith m or a genetic algorithm are utilized. The methods were thoroughly tested for their performance. Their description and the results of the tests are the main contributions of this paper.