A Traffic Flow System Design Based On The Granular Computing And Cellular Automata

A cellular automaton is a mathematical model which is all discrete in space, time and variables, and has been widely applied to the simulation of variously physical phenomena. The concept of granule and granular computing came from and is the expansion of the rough set theory.In this paper, based on the granular computing and cellular automata, a brand new traffic flow simulation consisting of cells, granules and traffic network is proposed, along with the definitions of new flow charts and data structures, a radical change to the fundamental structure of traditional traffic flow systems. In this new traffic flow simulation system, the idea of granules and granular computing is reflected in the concept of motorcade designed within, bases on which the status of all cars would be updated, during any time step, in the hierarchal order of road sections, motorcades and vehicles.During the process of designing this system, the updating rules for cars has been greatly ameliorated against the traditional NS models and its derivative ones, in order for better adaptation to the real traffic conditions. Besides, good quality of expansion in this system has also been guaranteed by various kinds of parameters designed for controlling the status alteration when cars move.This system is implemented under the Visual Studio.NET platform, in the idea of object-oriented programming, and has been compared with and contrasted to those based on the NS model. The result indicates that in comparison with the NS model, the phenomenon of jam cluster has occurred much less especially when the density of cars are high, and the average velocity of cars has notably increased in the improved model consisting of cells, granules and traffic network.The innovative points of this paper lie in:1,combining the idea of granules and granular computing and the cellular automata model, designing and implementing this improved traffic flow simulation system;2,establishing the three-layered traffic flow model consisting of cells, granules and traffic network, a new way to study the traffic flow system;3,designing and implementing a traffic flow system with certain expansion so that others can use for simulation of prediction under concrete circumstances.