Leveraging rapid simulation and analysis of large urban road systems on HPC

The scalable implementation of a microscopic simulation, presented in our previous work, opens new areas of applications for traffic simulation, namely short term traffic forecasting. It can be used for real-time prediction of local, exceptional situations. Moreover it can be used as a hypothesis verification tool for evaluating different strategies of traffic control. In order to realize such simulations in a very short time (what is crucial here) a sufficient computing power is necessary what can be achieved using dedicated HPC hardware. In this paper we present methods for rapid analysis of simulation results for large urban road systems, where a local, exceptional situation can remain unnoticed. We propose new metrics for detecting and locating such situations. The detected situation can be handled automatically with the method based on the multi-variant planning approach.