WHAT: Transportation Analysis Simulation System (Transims)
WHERE: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico
WHY: To understand how populations behave and how their behaviors affect larger social and infrastructural networks. The software helps urban planners predict the relative impact of potential public projects on traffic flow and surrounding neighborhoods. Next month, Los Alamos researchers will use Transims to study about 120,000 intersections and roads in the 250-square-mile area around downtown Portland, Oregon. PricewaterhouseCoopers plans to offer the software commercially.
WHO: Los Alamos National Laboratory, US Department of Transportation, and PricewaterhouseCoopers
HOW: Transims extrapolates USCensus data to create a synthetic population, which is assigned activities - such as driving to work - based on diaries kept by selected residents of the studied area. Transims then factors in transit-system constraints and simulates traffic flow, plotting the most efficient routes with Dïjkstra's algorithm. In this view of downtown Portland, color-coded walls indicate the number of cars expected to travel through the area during a 15-minute period. Red charts low-density flow; green depicts higher volumes.
MORE: transims.tsasa.lanl.gov
