MOSS: A Large-scale Open Microscopic Traffic Simulation System

TL;DR

MOSS is a GPU-accelerated microscopic traffic simulation system that enables large-scale, realistic, and efficient traffic modeling by generating demand data through neural networks and providing an open-source toolchain.

Contribution

The paper introduces MOSS, a novel traffic simulation system that combines GPU acceleration and neural network-based demand generation for large-scale, realistic traffic modeling.

Findings

Significantly improved simulation efficiency and scale.

Realistic travel demand generation using neural networks.

Open-source toolchain for traffic simulation and analysis.

Abstract

In the research of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), traffic simulation is a key procedure for the evaluation of new methods and optimization of strategies. However, existing traffic simulation systems face two challenges. First, how to balance simulation scale with realism is a dilemma. Second, it is hard to simulate realistic results, which requires realistic travel demand data and simulator. These problems limit computer-aided optimization of traffic management strategies for large-scale road networks and reduce the usability of traffic simulations in areas where real-world travel demand data are lacking. To address these problems, we design and implement MObility Simulation System (MOSS). MOSS adopts GPU acceleration to significantly improve the efficiency and scale of microscopic traffic simulation, which enables realistic and fast simulations for large-scale road networks. It provides realistic travel Origin-Destination (OD) matrices generation through a pre-trained generative neural network model based on publicly available data on a global scale, such as satellite imagery, to help researchers build meaningful travel demand data. It also provides a complete open toolchain to help users with road network construction, demand generation, simulation, and result analysis. The whole toolchain including the simulator can be accessed at https://moss.fiblab.net and the codes are open-source for community collaboration.