Supporting real-world network-oriented mesoscopic traffic simulation on GPU

Mesoscopic traffic simulation is a promising technology for handling large-scale dynamic traffic assignment problems. Meanwhile, GPU has been a research hotspot in the last decade because of its massive parallel performance compared with CPU. Although several works deal with GPU-based parallel performance, few have addressed the issue of real-world network applications. Thus, the performance of GPU on realistic road networks is still not clear. In this paper, an ideal grid network and a realistic Singapore expressway network are implemented and compared. The former gets a speedup of 10.00 while the latter only get a speedup of 2.37. The two main reasons for this lower efficiency of a real network are the more complex data structure caused by network topology and fewer numbers of threads due to the scale of the expressway network. Future works need more effort to develop a system with better data structure and better designed concurrent threads.