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Towards Discrete-Event, Aggregating, and Relational Control Interfaces for Traffic Simulation

Published: 21 June 2023 Publication History

Abstract

The use of IoT and AI/ML to extract insights for Data-Driven Decision-Making (DDDM) in Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS) is becoming increasingly popular. While simulation is a cost-effective and safe way to evaluate such approaches, existing simulators are often impractical due to inefficient control interfaces. In this work, we propose a Discrete-Event, Aggregating, and Relational Control Interfaces (DAR-CI) framework for achieving efficient traffic management simulations through a coupled approach. It enables a non-blocking interaction mode based on a discrete-event synchronization architecture. The overhead caused by data exchange is substantially reduced by supporting the direct retrieval of temporal metrics, data batch processing and customized in-situ aggregation. Combined with flexible, extendable, easy-to-understand, and implementation-friendly semantic specifications, we propose DAR-CI to serve as a universal tool for the traffic simulation community, taking the use and control of traffic simulation to a new level. A proof-of-concept study on the simulation of an adaptive traffic light control system demonstrates a 9.53X speedup compared to TraCI, a widely used protocol for controlling traffic simulators.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGSIM-PADS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation
June 2023
173 pages
ISBN:9798400700309
DOI:10.1145/3573900
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 21 June 2023

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Author Tags

  1. Co-simulation
  2. Interactive Simulation
  3. Traffic Control Interface (TraCI)
  4. Traffic Simulation

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