An automated highway system simulator

SmartPath is simulation package for an automated highway system (AHS). The program may be used to understand how an AHS would perform under various control policies in terms of highway capacity, traffic flow, and other performance measures of interest to transportation system planners and engineers. SmartPath also can be used to test, simulate, and evaluate the performance of the designs of different modules and instrumentations like engine models, sensors, and communications. The package consists of two separate modules: simulation and animation. The animation program runs on Silicon Graphics workstations and the simulation runs on Sun Sparc or Silicon Graphics workstations. The animation program produces a three-dimensional color animation of AHS traffic. SmartPath is a microsimulation: the system elements and the control policies are each individually modeled. The control policies are, for the most part, parametrically specified, so users can study the performance variations by changing the specifications. In this paper, the authors discuss the modeling of the basic elements of SmartPath. They describe the organization of these elements in the simulation and the assumptions underlying the design, such as availability of certain communication infrastructure and appropriate sensors. The authors also summarize SmartPath’s computational performance.