Development of an application programming interface for real vehicular behavior at signalized intersections in AIMSUN simulator

Abstract

In traffic engineering, vehicular behavioral computer simulators are used to create useful digital representations for the analysis of the road network current situation and the evaluation of proposals for solutions of road conflicts. In order to perform graphic representations of vehicular behaviors, simulation programs use mathematical models that arise from the observation of vehicle behavior in real situations. Analyzing traffic intersections with current programs, it is observed that vehicular speeds are not modified when vehicles have decided to pass the traffic light once the signal changes from green to yellow, while in real situations some users increase the speed at the beginning of the yellow phase causing them to cross the intersection in red. The objective of the present research is the creation of an application program ming interface (API) to modify the behavior of the simulation at a signalized intersection in the simulator AIMSUN. By using the simulator modules to work with external applications, the programming code in Visual Studio was made using C++ language to create a dynamic-link library (DLL). The results obtained show that vehicle behavior in the simulator can be modified so that vehicles accelerate before the green-yellow phase change when they are less than 50 m far from the stop line to adhere to the actual behavior.