SALT-Viz: Real-Time Visualization for Large-Scale Traffic Simulation

Abstract

The visualization of large-scale traffic simulation is a key problem for most big cities. Moreover, it is very important to visualize results of traffic simulations for each timestep in real-time, in order to analysis urban traffic congestion status accurately. However, large-scale traffic simulation and visualization has always been considered a challenging research topic, due to the preparation difficulty of massive road networks to simulate. In this paper, we present the SALT1, a novel traffic simulator and visualizer, that can handle large-scale urban traffic simulation. It introduces the concept of dynamic detailed geometry generation using base geometric information with attributes (e.g., the number of lanes) of links in road networks. Our system can provide efficient geometry processing and real-time level-of-detail rendering of traffic simulation results. The experimental results demonstrate that our system can be successfully applied to large- scale real-world urban traffic simulation.1 SALT is the abbreviation for “Simulation for AnaLyzing urban Traffic”, which is our project code name.