MOSS: A Large-scale Open Microscopic Traffic Simulation System
Jun Zhang, Wenxuan Ao, Junbo Yan, Can Rong, Depeng Jin, Wei Wu, Yong Li
TL;DR
MOSS tackles the dual challenge of achieving realistic microscopic traffic simulation at large scales and generating globally realistic travel demand data. It combines a GPU-accelerated microscopic simulator with a diffusion-model OD generator trained on satellite imagery, enabling realistic, scalable traffic studies across the globe. The system is complemented by a complete open toolchain (map builder, demand conversion, visualization, Python API, and SUMO converter), and demonstrated to deliver substantial speedups, realistic dynamics, and applicability to large-scale optimization. Collectively, MOSS broadens the practical reach of ITS research and supports advanced optimization approaches, including reinforcement learning, on city- and region-scale road networks.
Abstract
In the research of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), traffic simulation is a key procedure for the evaluation of new methods and optimization of strategies. However, existing traffic simulation systems face two challenges. First, how to balance simulation scale with realism is a dilemma. Second, it is hard to simulate realistic results, which requires realistic travel demand data and simulator. These problems limit computer-aided optimization of traffic management strategies for large-scale road networks and reduce the usability of traffic simulations in areas where real-world travel demand data are lacking. To address these problems, we design and implement MObility Simulation System (MOSS). MOSS adopts GPU acceleration to significantly improve the efficiency and scale of microscopic traffic simulation, which enables realistic and fast simulations for large-scale road networks. It provides realistic travel Origin-Destination (OD) matrices generation through a pre-trained generative neural network model based on publicly available data on a global scale, such as satellite imagery, to help researchers build meaningful travel demand data. It also provides a complete open toolchain to help users with road network construction, demand generation, simulation, and result analysis. The whole toolchain including the simulator can be accessed at https://moss.fiblab.net and the codes are open-source for community collaboration.