Cellular Automata Simulations of Traffic: A Model for the City of Geneva

This paper proposes a micro-simulation based on a simple cellular automata model to analyze and describe the traffic of cars in the city of Geneva. We consider a road network containing the most important roads in the city center and its suburbs. As many as 1066 street junctions are considered, for a total network length of about 4000 km. Our simulation reproduces the rush hour period, based on real data involving around 85000 vehicles. The main properties we study concern the average travel time and its fluctuation of various routes, as a function of the departure time. Finally we briefly discuss the computer implementation of our model and its performance on a parallel computer.