Preparation of Digital Maps for Traffic Simulation; Part 1: Approach and Algorithms

Abstract

Traffic simulations are an accepted tool for investigations on road traffic and used widely within the traffic science community. Modern computer systems are fast enough to model and simulate traffic within large areas at a microscopic scale regarding each vehicle, replacing macroscopic simulations in most cases. Although microscopic traffic simulations offer better quality than macroscopic ones, they also need additional data to describe the modelled road networks. A street’s lanes are modelled explicitly within microscopic simulations and in most cases also the connections between their lanes over junctions. If one wants to model large areas, the best source to get the description about their road network is the usage of digital maps. Unfortunately, most of these are used for routing purposes and do not contain the fine-grained information mentioned above that is needed by microscopic simulations. This document describes an algorithm for the computation of the needed information from simple road networks.