An exploratory study of road network simulations for urban transport planning with SUMO

Abstract

Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) is an open-source, highly portable, microscopic and continuous traffic simulation package designed to handle large networks. In this report, an experiment where SUMO was used to model a portion of Jurong West (Singapore)'s road networks was conducted, varying the demand to simulate different traffic loads to study the capabilities and utility of SUMO as a simulation package for Urban Mobility Planning. Notably, SUMO is free and open-source, and some hardships are to be expected. This report looked at some of the relevant capabilities of SUMO, which includes network performance analyses down to the edge/lane level. Public Buses were also included to observe the intermodal interactions of passenger vehicles and buses, with an \textit{unsuccessful} attempt at getting accurate real-world schedules with GTFS, but works decently with artificial schedules. This report revealed some difficulties and challenges faced while trying to simulate a real-world road network in Singapore and touched on some promising/interesting possible future works that can (in theory) be done on SUMO.