A First Step Towards Dynamic Hybrid Traffic Modeling

Hybrid traffic modeling and simulation provide an important way to represent and evaluate large-scale traffic networks at different levels of details. The first level, called “microscopic” allows the description of individual vehicles and their interactions as well as the study of driver’s individual behavior. The second, based on the analogy with fluidic dynamic, is the “macroscopic” one and provides an efficient way to represent traffic flow behavior in large traffic infrastructures, using three aggregated variables: traffic density, mean speed and traffic volume. An intermediate level called “mesoscopic” considers a group of vehicles sharing common properties such as a same origin and destination. The work conducted in this paper presents a first step allowing simulation of wide area traffic network on the basis of dynamic hybrid modeling, where the representation associated to a network section can change at runtime. The proposed approach is implemented in a simulation platform, called JAM-FREE.