CityMoS: City Mobility Simulator

The City Mobility Simulator has matured from a research project at TUMCREATE to a market-ready mobility simulation product. Visit https://citymos.net/ for easy access to essential information on CityMoS, the high-performance digital twin solution for city-scale transport systems. Learn more about its capabilities and application areas, and explore the Case Studies, that feature how CityMoS is being used in complex real-world scenarios.

CityMoS is a City Mobility Simulator that has been developed within the AIDA group since 2012. Previously called Scalable Electro-Mobility Simulator (SEMSim), CityMoS has evolved into a feature-rich mobility simulation platform encompassing both private and public transport.

The capabilities of CityMoS focus on high-performance execution, advanced models for vehicle components and driver behaviour as well as usability.

Goals

The goal of CityMoS is to provide domain researchers with tools for conducting high-impact research on novel technologies like autonomous mobility. In view of this goal CityMoS aims to provide researchers with easy-to-use tools that are at the same time highly performant and can run on a variety of environment, from workstation computers and laptops to high-performance clusters and the cloud.

The agent-based simulation allows for a detailed view on individual behaviour models and discover emerging effects that cannot be modelled using numerical, analytical and lower resolution traffic simulations. Interactions between agents and their slightly different model parametrizations produces a heterogenic population, as it exists in the real world.

CityMoS Exists in Two Variants

CityMoS HPC (high-performance computing), which enables fast execution of complex simulation scenarios on high-performance hardware in supercomputing centres or in cloud environments.
CityMoS 3D relies on the same underlying models and execution mechanisms, while at the same time providing 3D visualisation for real-time inspection and interaction.

The models used in CityMoS are generic and are thus not limited to scenarios focusing on Singapore. The extensibility and configurability of the built-in models enables the simulation of various current and future mobility scenarios. Since entities such as private vehicles and busses are modelled on a microscopic level of detail, CityMoS is able to evaluate the movement of individual vehicles as well as the decision-making process defined through behaviour models of the mobile entities and the road infrastructure.

Features

Microscopic simulation models
Interactive 3D environment
Vehicle and system level data visualisation
Parallelised execution in high-performance computing and cloud environments
Use of open interfaces for bi-directional coupling (HLA, TraCI)
Private and public transport models
Modular architecture to simplify model development

Coupling Network and Mobility Simulation

With the rise of autonomous and intelligent vehicles, car-to-car communication will be an inherent part of tomorrow’s transport systems. Veins is an open-source simulation framework for vehicular networks that enables the fast analysis of these systems. Its capabilities cover the complete network stack, ranging from physical layer effects to modern wireless communication standards, such as IEEE 802.11p. CityMoS has its own interface to integrate high-detail simulation of communication networks between traffic participants using TraCI.

When run in tandem with Veins, CityMoS acts as a TraCI-Server and waits for incoming connection requests from a Veins client, e.g. a network simulator such as OMNeT++. This bidirectional coupling not only allows the network simulator to create and update its own representation of the mobile nodes (e.g. cars) based on the mobility computed by CityMoS, it also opens the possibility to change a vehicle’s behaviour according to information it has received via the communication channel. This makes CityMoS the ideal tool to study future connected transportation systems.

Applications of CityMoS

Interactive Virtual Research Lab

In the interactive virtual research lab, a joint project between TUMCREATE and Ars Electronica, CityMoS was used to simulate the behaviour of road-based vehicles and infrastructure as well as pedestrians.

Disturbance Range of Road Alterations

In a city-scale simulation experiment, CityMoS was used to determine the effect of road alterations on the overall conditions as well as the range of such changes throughout the Singapore traffic system.

Electromobility Study in Amsterdam

CityMoS is not limited to the Singapore context. In a large-scale experiment, CityMoS was used to evaluate the electromobility capabilities and charging infrastructure requirements in the Amsterdam metropolitan region.

Public Transport Simulation

Apart from private vehicles, CityMoS is also capable of simulating road-based public transport. This includes schedules and capacities of public transport services as well as vehicle component and public transport related behaviour models (e.g., energy consumption or dwelling).

CityMoS as a Research Tool

CityMoS is used as a research platform into general simulation technology, covering optimisation of simulation execution times through means of workload distribution, use of heterogeneous computing hardware and research into cloud-based simulation