A Novel Design of the Transport Infrastructure for Traffic Simulation Models

Abstract

Over the past decades, transport and traffic models have become powerful tools for transport and traffic practitioners and academics all over the world. Most of these commercial model packages provide proprietary and closed source software, which generally implies that users are not enabled to freely edit, modify and extend the code. Specifically for some of the new fields of applications such as the modelling of in-car systems and other ITS systems, and more generally for scientific research, access to the algorithms is often essential. The de facto option then is to code traffic models (or parts thereof) from scratch. To prevent this loss of knowledge and experience, an approach is required where code reuse and proper documentation is stimulated.