Demonstrating GeoSparkSim: A Scalable Microscopic Road Network Traffic Simulator Based on Apache Spark

Road network traffic data has been widely studied by researchers and practitioners in different areas such as urban planning, traffic prediction and spatial-temporal databases. The existing urban traffic simulators suffer from two critical issues (1) scalability: most of them only offer single-machine solutions which are not adequate to produce large-scale data. Some simulators can generate traffic in parallel but do not well balance the load among machines in a cluster. (2) granularity: many simulators do not consider microscopic traffic situations including traffic lights, lane changing, and car following. In the paper, we propose GeoSparkSim, a scalable traffic simulator which extends Apache Spark to generate large-scale road network traffic datasets with microscopic traffic simulation. The proposed system seamlessly integrates with a Spark-based spatial data management system, GeoSpark, to deliver a holistic approach that allows data scientists to simulate, analyze and visualize large-scale urban traffic data. To implement microscopic traffic models, GeoSparkSim employs a simulation-aware vehicle partitioning method to partition vehicles among different machines such that each machine has a balanced workload. A full-fledged prototype of GeoSparkSim is implemented in Apache Spark. In this demonstration, we will show the attendees how to issue GeoSparkSim simulation tasks via the user interface, visualize simulated vehicle movements, and monitor the backend Spark cluster status.