SITRA - Simple Traffic: Support Decision-Making in a Real Context with Traffic Simulation

Nowadays urban road traffic management presents a number of challenges: In fact, there is an increasing demand for physical mobility, new mobility models change the flow of the streets, and technology advancements such as autonomous cars result in considerable changes in driving behavior.

Decisions in traffic management that lead to physical modifications in the street network could be highly expensive and influence building prices. Such decisions can also be disruptive to the environment by destroying habitats and ecosystems and consequently leading to more pollution. It is thereby important that decision-makers have an efficient way of gaining more insights on the impact of possible decisions before these decisions are applied in practice. A vast amount of research already explored the topic of traffic management and prediction since more than 50 years. In this context, a number of simulation techniques and tools have been proposed and adopted to support decision-making.

We surveyed the existing technologies and we observed that traffic simulation presents significant usability limitations, as the existing simulation tools are tailored for transportation engineers, people with a background in computer science or consulting companies specialised in performing traffic simulations. This leads to outsourcing for decision makers and for researchers who need traffic flow information as input of subsequent studies and analyses (e.g., to investigate the economic impact of introducing a limited traffic zone).

In this thesis we propose Sitra, an approach to make traffic simulation more accessible and usable without advanced traffic engineering and software development skills. Users should be able to tweak network or population parameters from a UI and observe the results in an intuitive way to assess the impact of results for derivative studies.

We developed Sitra as a client-server application, leveraging MATSim, an existing simulation software, and incorporating it into the backend. We created a web frontend that allows users to run simulations directly on a map, change the network structure, adjust simulation parameters, and analyze the results. The underlying simulation software MATSim is open-source and provides large-scale agent-based transport simulations.

As a use case, we collaborated with economic researchers, who needed traffic simulation data to conduct a study in the domain of real-estate. In particular, their goal is to analyze the impact of the new traffic plan adopted by the city of Lugano in 2012, in terms of real-estate price changes and in residential location choices. To this aim, we received traffic flow and population data from the mobility office in Ticino. We run the simulation with the current traffic plan in Sitra and, using its network editing feature, we were able to run another simulation with the traffic plan before 2012.