Three dimensional modelling of Porto's network for electric mobility simulation

Abstract

Elevation data is very important for precise electric vehicle simulation. However, traffic simulators are often strictly two-dimensional and do not offer the capability of modelling urban networks taking elevation into account. In particular, SUMO — Simulation of Urban Mobility, an often used microscopic traffic simulation platform, relies on urban networks previously modelled with elevation data in order to provide access to this information during simulations. This work intends on tackling the problem of how to add this elevation data to urban network models — in particular for the case of the Porto urban network, in Portugal. With this goal in mind, a comparison between different altitude information retrieval approaches is made and a simple tool to annotate network models with altitude data is proposed. This paper starts by describing the methodological approach followed to develop the work, then describing and analysing its main findings. This description includes an in-depth explanation of the proposed tool. Lastly, this paper reviews some related work to this subject.