Parallel Traffic Flow Simulation of Freeway Networks, Phase 1: Final Report

Numerical methods for solving simple macroscopic traffic flow continuum models have been studied and efficiently implemented in traffic simulation codes. The Lax method is an explicit method which has been implemented to solve simple continuum model in the traffic simulation package KRONOS. In this part of the project we studied the implementation of the Lax method for solving a high-order flow conservation traffic model on Parallel Computers. We wrote an experimental code in C to simulate a freeway traffic flow. Tests with real data collected from the 1-35 W freeway in Minneapolis were conducted on a workstation computer. We then implemented the high order Lax method on a parallel machine and run tests with real data collected from an 18-mile stretch of the 1-494 freeway. The parallel implementation demonstrated significant execution time speedup.