An Erlang-based Simulation Approach of Artificial Transportation Systems

Artificial Transportation Systems (ATS) can support a variety of computational experiments for different purposes, and have become important tools for transportation research. However, when the road network modeled in ATS is large or there are a lot of vehicles, ATS will run very slow or even cannot be started due to the memory limit of a standalone computer. With the acceleration of urbanization process and rapid increase of car ownership, it is necessary to find a high-performance computing method for running large-scale ATS. Therefore, the paper presents an Erlang-based approach to realize concurrent and distributed computing of ATS. To verify the feasibility, a prototype is built, and a performance test is conducted. The results show the method can achieve the efficiency utilization of computing resources.