A Middleware-Based Approach for Multi-Scale Mobility Simulation

Modeling and simulation play an important role in transportation networks analysis. In the literature, authors have proposed many traffic and mobility simulations, with different features and corresponding to different contexts and objectives. They notably consider different scales of simulations. The scales refer to the represented entities, as well as to the space and the time representation of the transportation environment. However, we often need to represent different scales in the same simulation, for instance to represent a neighborhood interacting with a wider region. In this paper, we advocate for the reuse of existing simulations to build a new multi-scale simulation. To do so, we propose a middleware model to couple independent mobility simulations, working at different scales. We consider all the necessary processing and workflow to allow for a coherent orchestration of these simulations. We also propose a prototype implementation of the middleware. The results show that such a middleware is capable of creating a new multi-scale mobility simulation from existing ones, while minimizing the incoherence between them. They also suggest that, to have a maximal benefit from the middleware, existing mobility simulation platforms should allow for an external control of the simulations, allowing for executing a time step several times if necessary.