Traffic Simulator Input/Output GUI

Abstract

This project aims to address weaknesses in the configuration of the INTEGRATION 2.40 microscopic traffic simulation software. The project is very powerful, capable of simulating hundreds of thousands of vehicles travelling across thousands of roads, while recording a wide variety of metrics. However, the simulation software is configured by a variety of plaintext input files. These files contain newline-delimited fields, with some fields being multipart and whitespace-delimited. These fields are documented in English, with the expected type of the field, as well as other constraints such as field length or numeric field range, expressed in a table format in the documentation. Additionally, some field constraints span multiple files. For example, links in the simulation, defined in the Link File reference start and end nodes that must be defined in a separate Node File. Since there is no validation program to ensure that these input files, which can be tens to hundreds of lines long, with multiple hundreds of fields, have correct and sane values in an interactive, easily runnable format, producing and validating these files is a tedious process. The project solves the aforementioned problems by implementing a web-based interface to create, edit, manage, and validate the input files for the simulation tool. Users can upload a set of six input files, which together are defined as an input package, to the interface, which keeps track of the configured values. The fields in the input files can be edited through the interface through intuitive controls, such as text fields for text content, and drop-down menus for selections. Through the interface, users can perform automatic validation of the files. Any errors in constraint validation will then be surfaced to the user through the web interface, directing them to the appropriate field in the appropriate file for correction. Cross-file validation is also performed to ensure the input files are in a suitable form to be run by the simulation software. After editing and validating fields in the managed Package, users can opt to save the package to the server hosting the web interface, as well as download all input files as a zip package. Additionally, the web interface allows users to template traffic demand values, which is a key component of the Demand File. Users are able to parameterize and create multiple Demand Files (as well as multiple Master Files, which reference all other input files) for combinations of vehicle classes provided by the user. For example, a user might want to create separate input files where Vehicle Class 1 has a traffic demand between 0 and 0.5 (to a maximum of 1), and Vehicle Class 2 has a traffic demand between 0 and 0.2, both in increments of 0.1. This results in 6 * 3 = 18 demand files in total for each combination of the Vehicle Class 1 demand and Vehicle Class 2 demand. The web interface saves time needed to create these files manually, which can be extreme in cases with many combinations of vehicle demand classes. Our project is intended to help users of INTEGRATION 2.40 in saving their time and effort when creating input files for the simulation tool. Apart from the project implementation details, we also ensured that project infrastructure reduces user effort and maintenance. The project can be deployed on multiple platforms and can also be packaged as an easy to deploy Docker image for maximum flexibility.