SUMO – Simulation of Urban MObility

Traffic simulations facilitate the evaluation of infrastructure changes as well as policy changes before implementing them on the road. For example, the effectiveness of environmental zones or traffic light control algorithms can be tested and optimized in a simulation before being deployed in the real world.

SUMO is a free and open traffic simulation suite which is available since 2001. SUMO allows modelling of intermodal traffic systems including road vehicles, public transport and pedestrians. Included with SUMO is a wealth of supporting tools which handle tasks such as route finding, visualization, network import and emission calculation. SUMO can be enhanced with custom models and provides various APIs to remotely control the simulation.

For publications of studies which were performed with the aid of SUMO users are requested to include DLR in the acknowledgements and to refer to dlr.de/ts/sumo.

Features

The simulation platform SUMO offers many features:

Microscopic simulation - vehicles, pedestrians and public transport are modeled explicitly
Online interaction – control the simulation with TraCI
Simulation of multimodal traffic, e.g., vehicles, public transport and pedestrians
Time schedules of traffic lights can be imported or generated automatically by SUMO
No artificial limitations in network size and number of simulated vehicles
Supported import formats: OpenStreetMap, VISUM, VISSIM, NavTeq
SUMO is implemented in C++ and uses only portable libraries

Applicability

SUMO has been used within several projects for answering a large variety of research questions:

Evaluate the performance of traffic lights, including the evaluation of modern algorithms up to the evaluation of weekly timing plans.
Vehicle route choice has been investigated, including the development of new methods, the evaluation of eco-aware routing based on pollutant emission, and investigations on network-wide influences of autonomous route choice.
SUMO was used to provide traffic forecasts for authorities of the City of Cologne during the Pope’s visit in 2005 and during the Soccer World Cup 2006.
SUMO was used to support simulated in-vehicle telephony behavior for evaluating the performance of GSM-based traffic surveillance.
SUMO is widely used by the V2X community for both, providing realistic vehicle traces, and for evaluating applications in an on-line loop with a network simulator.

Components

The SUMO package contains the following applications:

SUMO: command line simulation
GUISIM: simulation with a graphical user interface
NETCONVERT: network importer
NETGEN: abstract networks generator
OD2TRIPS: converter from O/D matrices to trips
JTRROUTER: routes generator based on turning ratios at intersections
DUAROUTER: routes generator based on a dynamic user assignment
DFROUTER: route generator with use of detector data
MAROUTER: macroscopic user assignment based on capacity functions
NETEDIT: Visual editor for street networks, traffic lights, detectors, and further network elements

Reference projects

SUMO has been used in several national and international projects: