Methods for Division of Road Traffic Networks Focused on Load-Balancing

The road traffic simulation is an important tool for analysis and control of road traffic networks. In order to be able to simulate very large traffic networks in a reasonable time, it is possible to use a distributed computing environment. There, the combined power of multiple interconnected computers is utilized. During the adaptation of the simulation for the distributed environment, it is necessary to divide the traffic network into sub-networks, which are then simulated on particular nodes of the distributed computer. The load-balancing of the sub-networks and the communication between them are two key issues. In this paper, we compare the methods for traffic network division, which we developed. The methods are focused on load-balancing and consist of two steps – assigning of weights to the traffic lanes and the marking of traffic lanes, which shall be divided. For the first step, traffic simulations of different level of detail are utilized. For the second step, a modified breadth-first search algorithm or a genetic algorithm are utilized. The methods were thoroughly tested for their performance. Their description and the results of the tests are the main contributions of this paper.