Realistic Mobility Simulator For Smart Traffic Systems And Applications

Cars have become essential elements of modern life. But nowadays the increasing number of cars also leads to problems: pollution, traffic jams, wasted time spent in traffic because of traffic bottlenecks, etc.. Traffic cannot cope anymore with the rate of car usage today. Fortunately, in the last years various Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) demonstrate innovative services relating to different modes of transport and traffic management, and enable various users to be better informed and make safer, more coordinated, and ’smarter’ use of transport networks. For such systems, a lot of attention has been dedicated to develop realistic models of roads and of the vehicle mobility, by exploiting the extensive literature developed in the field of transportation systems, e.g., models of how cars move along a road. Here, we present the realization of a morerealistic simulation tool, SimCar. The simulator uses as input data real-life traces collected over long periods of time, involving potentially thousands of drivers, to provide a realistic support mobility model for high-level methods and techniques designed to optimize traffic. On top, developers can simulate advanced traffic networking solutions and intelligent transportation applications, under real-world conditions. We present our results for an application designed to optimize the costs involved in using navigators, that actively incorporate solutions borrowed from opportunistic computing and context data to optimize the user‘s experience.