The goal of our work is a full 24-hour simulation of all of Switzerland, including transit traffic, freight traffic, and all modes of transportation. This will involve about 7.5 million travelers, and more than 20 million trips (including short pedestrian trips, etc.). A more short-term goal is a full 24-hour simulation of all of car traffic in Switzerland. For this, we will have about 4.5 million car trips. However, we have not yet met this goal completely; current results refer to simulations of the morning peak only. Our network consists of 10564 nodes and 28622 links. This network is provided by the Swiss transportation planning authorities. Besides the standard attributes for geographical location and length, the links have speed, capacity, and type attributes.
In order to test our modules and our framework, we use a so-called Gotthard scenario. In this scenario, 50'000 travelers/vehicles start, with a random starting time between 6am and 7am, at random locations all over Switzerland, and with a destination in Lugano/Ticino. Although this scenario has some resemblance with vacation traffic in Switzerland, its main purpose is to test the congestion dynamics of the micro-simulation, and its interaction with the feedback framework. This will become clear later in the text.
We have a second testing scenario, the 6-9 scenario, which is larger in scale than the Gotthard scenario, but still smaller than our eventual goal. In this scenario, 1'000'000 travelers/vehicles drive typical morning rush hour trips beginning between 6am and 9am throughout the Switzerland network. This is more realistic than the Gotthard scenario, as it is based on real-world trip data, and can be compared to actual road count data taken throughout Switzerland. The actual comparison is reported elsewhere (45). More details about the origin of the input data can be found in (46).