Visual analytics tool for urban traffic simulation

Nowadays is extremely important to monitor and analyze the urban environment and in particular the urban viability. The increasing availability of computational power, together with more efficient simulation algorithm allows real time modeling of even complex systems such as urban traffic. Information and simulation are at the basis of the decisional process for policy makers at global and local level. In this context, visualization tools are useful aids where the understanding of a simulated phenomenon is quite difficult. In recent years, microscopic traffic simulations have become an increasingly active field of research in transport engineering. However the main challenge of these systems is related to the high ’learning curve’ and to the complex interface of the analysis tools. Often these models are used by final users that have specific competences to evaluate the phenomena and take appropriate decision. However, often these tools lack in usability and visualization makes it difficult to extract useful information. To face this problem it is important to develop a visual-analytic tool with easily readable results for users with different backgrounds, in order to catch the important information in short time. In this paper we present a highly interactive visual analytics system that helps urban planners, decision makers and traffic analysts simulate and analyze the urban scenario related to the urban viability. The design of the interface has not been based on traditional pull-down menus, panels or buttons that can take the user outside of the frame of the task. The interaction is ensured through direct actions with the 3d context in order to make the operations intuitive and easy to perform. In this way the user is cognitively focused during the problem solving. The user can interact with the 3d environment through graphical metaphors that reduce considerably the time needed to set the parameters for the simulation as well as the time needed to analyze the results. In this paper we focus on the design of the interface and on the visual analysis of the simulation model.