Distributed large-scale network modeling with paramics implementation

Distributed simulation modeling is in urgent need for two reasons: one is that the computational power demanded by the large-scale microscopic traffic simulation keeps increasing; the other is that independently and incrementally developed sub-networks of a large region need to be modeled simultaneously due to their interactions. In this paper, we propose a distributed modeling framework which including two categories of modeling strategies, namely, light global control/independent subnets vs. heavy global control/coordinated subnets. We have implemented the distributed scheme of light global control/independent subnets and the implemented details, such as communication techniques and vehicle transferring across the boundary of two subnets are discussed. Unlike the previous studies using the dedicated high performance machines, our efforts are to utilize the low-cost networked PCs that are commonly available. By using the application programming interface (API) functions supported by off-the-shelf paramics software, we are able to distribute the computational load of microscopic simulation to multiple single-processor PCs without access the proprietary source codes of the simulation program. Performance testing and analysis of the implemented prototype demonstrate that the proposed framework is very promising.