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<h1 class="article-title"><?php echo $pageTitle; ?></h1>
<h2>Simulating Urban Traffic for Modeling and Analysis</h2>
<p>
<a href="https://projects.eclipse.org/user/8509">Robert Hilbrich</a> provides an overview of the<a
href="https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.sumo"
> Eclipse Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO)</a> project, the different ways it can be used, and
its relationship to the openMobility Working Group.
</p>
<p><img src="images/3_1.jpg"></p>
<p>
<strong>Q. What should people know about the Eclipse SUMO project?</strong>
</p>
<p>A. They should know that this is a production-ready software toolset that allows them
to quickly and easily create a digital twin of a city or an urban area so they can simulate
real-world traffic &mdash; whether that&rsquo;s motorized vehicle traffic, rail traffic, bicycle
traffic, pedestrian traffic, or even ship traffic. These simulations can be used to identify
traffic patterns, test traffic management ideas and algorithms, and determine how traffic flows
can be improved.</p>
<p>
<strong>Q. Where did the Eclipse SUMO project originate?</strong>
</p>
<p>A. The project started at the German Aerospace Center in Berlin, where I work and where
we do considerable research into transportation systems and transportation engineering.</p>
<p>Almost 20 years ago, we started working towards building a digital twin for a city, but
computers were still quite slow then. Today, computers can build really powerful digital models of
cities and we see a lot of happy customers that are using the SUMO tool suite.</p>
<p>
<strong>Q. Can you describe some of the ways people are using Eclipse SUMO? </strong>
</p>
<p>A. The SUMO tool suite is being used in many different ways, but here are just three
examples to give you an idea:</p>
<ul>
<li>The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is looking into running SUMO on their number
one super computer to simulate the entire area at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
Their goal is to understand the traffic patterns around the airport so they can suggest
improvements that will help people get to the airport quicker, ensure parking is not
overcrowded, and enable people to get to their planes on time.</li>
<li>The city of Konstanz in southern Germany is relying on a SUMO simulation to understand and
optimize parking in the city center. With the simulation, they can see the effects of different
types of parking spots &mdash; on-street parking, off-street parking, and parking garages
&mdash; on traffic congestion in the surrounding areas.</li>
<li>Several municipalities are looking into how traffic lights and autonomous vehicles can
communicate with one another to streamline traffic flows. So, the traffic light would tell your
car the ideal speed to drive at to avoid red lights. And your car would tell the next set of
traffic lights when it will be arriving so the traffic light can optimize its light control
schedule and maybe hold the green light a little longer if you&rsquo;re nearly there. Car speed
and traffic light cycles can also be optimized to reduce fuel consumption and idling times at
lights, and to give preference to electric vehicles as an incentive for the public to buy them.</li>
</ul>
<p>On these types of projects, we typically see collaboration between municipalities,
traffic light developers, and autonomous vehicle manufacturers. </p>
<p><img src="images/3_2.jpg"></p>
<p>
<strong>Q. The SUMO tool suite sounds very sophisticated. Is it difficult to get started using it?</strong>
</p>
<p>A. Not at all. The project SUMO tool suite comes with a web wizard that lets you create
a digital twin of your city in just seven clicks. All you need to get started is data that
describes the road network in the city. This data is available for free through the OpenStreetMap
project, but can also be obtained from other external data sources. The software uses the road
network data to create a SUMO simulation that looks like your city in about 20 seconds.</p>
<p>At this point, the traffic in the simulation is random so you need to add traffic
demand data. Getting this data can be a bit trickier, but some larger cities already use traffic
demand models to plan public transportation and build road networks, and they&rsquo;re often happy
to share that data. Other cities use induction loops in their road networks to count the number of
moving vehicles, and you can use these counts to build a traffic demand model.</p>
<p>
<strong>Q. Why is it important that Eclipse SUMO is open source? </strong>
</p>
<p>A. It is very important because it helps us reach a broad audience of researchers and
industries that can add cutting-edge research and new algorithms to our software so the traffic
simulations will perform even better in the future than they do today.</p>
<p>Also, the industry wants to avoid vendor lock-in so having a software platform
that&rsquo;s not linked to a particular vendor, is of very high quality, and very rich in
functionality has been the cornerstone of the success for the SUMO in the past.</p>
<p>
<strong>Q. What is the relationship between Eclipse SUMO and the openMobility Working Group hosted
by the Eclipse Foundation?</strong>
</p>
<p>A. We had reached the point where there was a lot of industry interest in Eclipse SUMO.
A number of players were using SUMO to build projects and others were integrating SUMO into their
commercial offerings. As a result, we were getting a lot of questions about how SUMO can be used
to build business, whether it would still exist in five years, and what the roadmap looks like.</p>
<p>
We created the<a href="https://www.eclipse.org/org/workinggroups/openmobility_charter.php">
openMobility Working Group</a> so we would have a roundtable where we can bring together key
customers and key users with a vested interest in the future of SUMO in a consortium that can
steer and influence its direction.
</p>
<p>So, the Eclipse SUMO project is where all the coding happens. And, everything that is
not code related &mdash; strategy, marketing, roadmaps, information dissemination &mdash; is
coordinated and steered by the openMobility Working Group.</p>
<p>Today, the openMobility Working Group consists of research partners and industry
partners, including Bosch and AVL, which is a big player in the car simulator world. The Working
Group is currently focused on the Eclipse SUMO project, but in the near future, we are expecting
to add the Eclipse MOSAIC project to our portfolio. MOSAIC will provide a framework for building a
&ldquo;bridge&rdquo; between SUMO and other simulators. SUMO is rarely used on its own, so
it&rsquo;s very important that it can be easily coupled with other simulators to precisely model
autonomous vehicles or add 5G communications in the digital model.</p>
<p>
<strong>Q. How do you see SUMO advancing in the short term and the longer term?</strong>
</p>
<p>A. We are working on a number of areas right now.</p>
<p>In the short term, we&rsquo;re really trying to integrate more precise models for
pedestrian dynamics. They&rsquo;re called social force models and we&rsquo;re working to add these
models into SUMO to make pedestrian movements much more realistic. </p>
<p>We&rsquo;re also working to incorporate railroad traffic and having trains behave more
realistically.</p>
<p>And, we are working on fleet management. If you think about all of the new forms of
public transportation, such as Uber and Lyft, and the demand-response mechanisms behind them, you
can see that SUMO is the perfect tool suite to assist in optimizing the way these vehicles drive,
where they pick up passengers, and the routes they take.</p>
<p>
<strong>Q. How can people get involved and learn more?</strong>
</p>
<p>
A. I would like to invite everyone who is interested in the future of SUMO to<a
href="https://openmobility.eclipse.org/working-group/become-a-member/"
> join the openMobility Working Group</a> to ensure the features they need are delivered with the
right priority.
</p>
<p>
We also host a SUMO User Conference every year in Berlin. The next conference is in May 2020, and
people can learn more about it<a
href="https://www.dlr.de/ts/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-3930/20125_read-58718/"
> </a><a href="https://sumo.dlr.de/2020">here</a>.
</p>
<p><img src="images/3_3.jpg"></p>
<div class="bottomitem">
<h3>About the Author</h3>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-sm-16">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-sm-6">
<img class="img-responsive"
src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2019/december/images/robert.png" alt="Robert Hilbrich"
/>
</div>
<div class="col-sm-18">
<p class="author-name">Robert Hilbrich</p>
<p>Group Manager<br>Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR)</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>