Since in the application, many of the problems are fairly large, one
needs to keep an eye on computing speed. A useful measure for this
are ``vehicle updates per second''. Let's say that for a simulation
with vehicles and
time steps we need 10 seconds of
computing time. Then we have
vehicle updates per 10 seconds, or
vehicle updates per second. This number is typical for a
simple implementation on a 300 MHz CPU.
Under unix one obtains the computing speed for example via time (see man-page). My personal result looks like
{} 92.88user 0.00system 1:34.50elapsed 98%CPU (0avg...We are most interested in ``92.88user'' (coresponding to 92.88 sec).
Transportation science sometimes does the ``real time limit'' (for our
purposes the number of vehicles with which the simulation runs as
fast as reality).
All of these values depend on the vehicle density, which therefore always needs to be given when giving computing speeds.