Traffic Simulation Framework - a Cellular Automaton based tool for simulating and investigating real city traffic

Over the last century the number of vehicles engaged in the road traffic have been increasing rapidly. Traffic congestion and traffic jams became a serious problem, especially in big agglomerations. Various concepts are being applied to better understand the traffic flow phenomenon. In the paper we present the Traffic Simulation Framework (TSF) which is an information system for simulating a vehicular traffic in the real city road networks. The system is equipped with a comprehensive visualization which enables users to set and modify simulation parameteres and road network preferences. It also supports gathering detailed data related with the simulated traffic. In the paper we also describe a general traffic simulation model implementated a core module of the TSF system. It is a probabilistic cellular automaton model which is a strong generalization of some popular traffic simulation models.