Traffic simulations on parallel computers using domain decomposition techniques

Large scale simulations of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) can only be achieved by using the computing resources offered by parallel computing architectures. Domain decomposition techniques are proposed which allow the performance of traffic simulations with the standard simulation package TRAF-NETSIM on a 128 nodes IBM SPx parallel supercomputer as well as on a cluster of SUN workstations. Whilst this particular parallel implementation is based on NETSIM, a microscopic traffic simulation model, the presented strategy is applicable to a broad class of traffic simulations. An outer iteration loop must be introduced in order to converge to a global solution. A performance study that utilizes a scalable test network that consist of square-grids is presented, which addresses the performance penalty introduced by the additional iteration loop.