JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Abstract

This thesis presents the design and the implementation of Oulu Traffic Simulation System (OTSS), a traffic simulation system for the City of Oulu, Finland. Following agent-based approach, the simulation generates artificial agents that represent the population synthesis of the City of Oulu. Data from several sources, including official statistics, government-organized open data and crowdsourced information were collected and used as input for the simulation. Two traffic demand models are presented in this thesis: (1) the random model which generates traffic trips as random, discrete events; and (2) the activity-based model which defines traffic trips as sequential events in the agents’ day plan. The software development of the system follows the spiral model of software development and enhancement. During the implementation, several development cycles were conducted before the UML software design. The system was executed on two computation systems to test its real-time performance. To evaluate the traffic models, data extracted from the simulation was compared with aggregated survey data from Finnish Transport Agency and traffic count stations around the city. The results showed that a typical server is capable of running the simulation, and even though there were differences in the duration and distance of individual trips, the simulation reflects real-life traffic count significantly well.