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   Traffic Flow Simulator

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Downloadable Source Code

This applet simulates traffic flow using CA rules. The CA rules are specify as follows

• A freeway is modeled as a sequence of grid points.
• Every car occupies one grid point. Each grid point occupies at most one car.
• A car can have a speed of 0 - Vmax grid points per time interval.
• A car with speed of less than Vmax increases its speed by one unit in each time interval, until it reaches the maximum speed.
• If a car's distance to the car in front is d grid points, its speed is reduced to d-1 if necessary to avoid crashing into it.
• With a certain probability, in each time interval some cars slow down one unit for no good reason whatsoever.
• Each color represents different speed, if a grid point is empty, it's color is the default background color.

Applet Controls

• Slowdown: adjusts the probability of cars slowing dow.
• Arrival : adjusts the rate at which cars flow into the road.
• lamda: numeric value betwee [0,1] to specify how fast the car accelerates to catch up to speed.
• deterministic: select this to have the ability to manipulate different rules.
• undeterministic: select this to have rules preset.
• pause/resume: pauses to see the state of the road.



Future plans:

• need to incorporate lane changing rules into the applet.
• add a panel will contains a drag-down menu to select multiple lanes.
• add zooming capability, although this is a priority.