Updating SUMO Simulator for Lane less Traffic (Indian Scenario)

Abstract

A simulation model enables abstraction of the real system and permits one to focus on interesting phenomena. At the same time, the results obtained using simulation study are eloquent and useful only if the simulation model closely represents the real world scenario.

Many traffic simulators are available in literature (e.g. SUMO, VISSIM, VanetMobiSim, PARAMICS, etc. to name a few) that permit microscopic traffic simulation. However most of them model lane based traffic movement and homogeneous vehicles. SUMO supports customized vehicle types like two wheelers, three wheelers, cars, etc. However SUMO enforces lane discipline on smaller vehicles (like two wheelers) as well which is very unrealistic.

On Indian roads, majority of vehicles are two wheeler and traffic is less lane disciplined. To overcome the limitations of SUMO, and for better modeling of Indian traffic scenario, SimTram was developed by a transportation research group at IIT Bombay. SiMTram divides lane width into multiple strips and assigns road space to vehicles in terms of number of strips, thereby permitting multiple small vehicles to share the lane space.

However, SimTram was developed for older version of SUMO (SUMO 0.12) and was not adapted for later versions of SUMO which had many better features for more realistic traffic scenario representation.

In our study we adapted SiMTram for SUMO 0.17 version and made it available to the open source community. We carried out detailed performance analysis of SUMO 0.17 and the adapted SimTram (now onwards called SimTram) with respect to the edge level vehicle flow, density and speed for various traffic scenarios. Finally we conclude that which simulator is batter for modeling Indian traffic scenario.