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Project Details

Crossway Simulation

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Project CrosswaySimulation (or XWay Simulation) is not just a simulation program for crossroads, which you could perhabs think when you look at the name. This name has it's roots in the very early idea when we thought about what the project should be like. Back then we really just wanted to simulate a single crossway. But after some time of rethinking we soon realized, that it would be possible to simulate nearly every traffic situation, if we design our program absolutely modular. And that's what the program is now capable of: Simulating an nearly endless variety of road networks in combination with arbitary traffic density. The road network, the basis of the whole simulation, should be build from the user in an easy way out of basic components (like corners, straights, input/outputs(where the cars are coming from and going to) and of course our crossroads). But to be able to simulate even more complex situations in future, the application should be able to be flexible enough to change the modular building system without big problems.

So we decided very early to build the traffic modules in a way, so that it's independent from the used programming language. This way it is possible, to use this modules in another program again. Because of this given requirements we choose XML to fulfill them. During the developing process we saw that this decision was just right. And there is even another advantage except the liberty of the program language: You can change modules, make new ones or delete old ones without touching the sourcecode. Because of this, we even described the routes, cartypes and -classes and whole road networks in XML.

A main focus was on the visualization of the simulation results. We implemented two ways: On the one hand the user has the ability to follow the simulation "live". This way you have a realtime process and you actually see the cars moving on the roads. This way it is quite easy to locate traffic jams and other crucial situations. On the other hand you can let the program caluclate the simulation over a given span of time. The calculcation then is faster than realtime and the results are visible quite fast. But it depends on the given situation. The more cars, the more time is needed to finish the process. After calculation is finished, the user can see the results in graphical representations that are made for every traffic module.

This project was a semester work at university for "simulation" class. I realized it together with my felllow student Benjamin Gras. It was developed in Java.

At the moment there is a nasty bug that makes in impossible to run it on linux systems properly. But I will try to solve this and then upload the binary program and sourcecode.

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