Building Microscopic Road Network Traffic Simulators in Apache Spark

Abstract

Road network traffic data has been widely studied by researchers and practitioners in different areas such as urban planning, traffic prediction and spatial-temporal databases. For instance, researchers use such data to evaluate the impact of road network changes. Unfortunately, collecting large-scale highquality urban traffic data requires tremendous efforts because participating vehicles must install GPS receivers and administrators must continuously monitor these devices. There has been a number of urban traffic simulators trying to generate such data with different features. However, they suffer from two critical issues (1) scalability: most of them only offer singlemachine solution which is not adequate to produce large-scale data. Some simulators can generate traffic in parallel but do not well balance the load among machines in a cluster. (2) granularity: many simulators do not consider microscopic traffic situations including traffic lights, lane changing, car following. In the paper, we propose GeoSparkSim, a scalable traffic simulator which extends Apache Spark to generate large-scale road network traffic datasets with microscopic traffic simulation. The proposed system seamlessly integrates with a Spark-based spatial data management system, GeoSpark, to deliver a holistic approach that allows data scientists to simulate, analyze and visualize largescale urban traffic data. To implement microscopic traffic models, GeoSparkSim employs a simulation-aware vehicle partitioning method to partition vehicles among different machines such that each machine has a balanced workload. The experimental analysis shows that GeoSparkSim can simulate the movements of 200 thousand vehicles over a very large road network.

Publication
In IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management, MDM
Jia Yu
Jia Yu
Co-founder

Jia Yu is a co-founder of Wherobots Inc. and leads its engineering team. Jia is the creator of Apache Sedona and was a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Washington State University from 2020 to 2023. Jia’s research interests include database systems, distributed data systems and geospatial data management.

Mohamed Sarwat
Mohamed Sarwat
Assistant Professor

Mohamed Sarwat is an assistant professor of computer science at Arizona State University. His general research interest lies in developing robust and scalable data systems for spatial and spatiotemporal applications.

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