Modelling Altitude Information in Two-Dimensional Traffic Networks for Electric Mobility Simulation

Elevation data is important for electric vehicle simulation. However, traffic simulators are often two-dimensional and do not offer the capability of modelling urban networks taking elevation into account. Specifically, SUMO Simulation of Urban Mobility, a popular microscopic traffic simulator, relies on networks previously modelled with elevation data as to provide this information during simulations. This work tackles the problem of adding elevation data to urban network models particularly for the case of the Porto urban network, in Portugal. With this goal in mind, a comparison between different altitude information retrieval approaches is made and a simple tool to annotate network models with altitude data is proposed. The work starts by describing the methodological approach followed during research and development, then describing and analysing its main findings. This description includes an in-depth explanation of the proposed tool. Lastly, this work reviews some related work to the subject.