CityMoS

CityMoS (City Mobility Simulator) is an agent-based simulation platform developed at TUMCREATE for modelling city-scale transport systems. It began within the AIDA group in 2012 as the Scalable Electro-Mobility Simulator (SEMSim) and has grown into a feature-rich platform covering both private and public transport. Its capabilities focus on high-performance execution, advanced models for vehicle components and driver behaviour, and usability.

Goals

CityMoS aims to give domain researchers tools for conducting high-impact research on novel technologies such as autonomous mobility — tools that are easy to use, highly performant, and able to run across a range of environments, from workstations and laptops to high-performance clusters and the cloud.

Agent-based simulation allows a detailed view of individual behaviour models and reveals emerging effects that cannot be captured by numerical, analytical or lower-resolution traffic simulations. Interactions between agents, each with slightly different model parameters, produce a heterogeneous population like the one that exists in the real world.

CityMoS exists in two variants

• CityMoS HPC (high-performance computing) enables fast execution of complex simulation scenarios on high-performance hardware, in supercomputing centres or cloud environments.
• CityMoS 3D relies on the same underlying models and execution mechanisms while providing 3D visualisation for real-time inspection and interaction.

The models are generic and are not limited to Singapore. Because entities such as private vehicles and buses are modelled at a microscopic level of detail, CityMoS can evaluate the movement of individual vehicles as well as the decision-making defined by the behaviour models of mobile entities and road infrastructure.

Features

• Microscopic simulation models
• Interactive 3D environment
• Vehicle and system level data visualisation
• Parallelised execution in high-performance computing and cloud environments
• Open interfaces for bi-directional coupling
• Private and public transport models
• Modular architecture to simplify model development

Coupling network and mobility simulation

As autonomous and intelligent vehicles become more common, vehicle-to-vehicle communication will be an inherent part of future transport systems. CityMoS can be coupled with network simulators so that communication between traffic participants is simulated alongside their movement — allowing a vehicle’s behaviour to change in response to information received over the communication channel. This makes CityMoS well suited to studying connected transport systems.

Applications of CityMoS

Interactive virtual research lab

In a joint project between TUMCREATE and Ars Electronica, CityMoS simulated the behaviour of road-based vehicles, infrastructure and pedestrians.

Disturbance range of road alterations

In a city-scale experiment, CityMoS was used to determine the effect of road alterations on overall traffic conditions, and how far those effects reach across the Singapore transport system.

Electromobility study in Amsterdam

CityMoS is not limited to the Singapore context. In a large-scale experiment it was used to evaluate electromobility capabilities and charging infrastructure requirements in the Amsterdam metropolitan region.

Public transport simulation

Beyond private vehicles, CityMoS simulates road-based public transport, including service schedules and capacities as well as vehicle component and public-transport behaviour models such as energy consumption and dwelling.

CityMoS as a research tool

CityMoS is also a research platform for simulation technology itself — optimising execution times through workload distribution, use of heterogeneous computing hardware, and cloud-based simulation.