Integrated meso-microscale traffic simulation of hierarchical AHS control architectures

A recently developed meso-microscale traffic simulator allows a stationary region of micro-simulation to be defined within a larger, meso-simulated automated highway system (AHS). This simulator permits analysis of traffic behavior in situations where both microscopic (vehicle-level) and mesoscopic (aggregate flow) effects are important, while avoiding the prohibitive computational cost of microsimulating a large-scale AHS. This paper describes the software structure of the meso-micro simulator, which implements the PATH AHS control architecture. Simulation results indicate that the meso-micro simulator generates consistent traffic flows across both meso and micro-simulated regions