Sumo at a Glance

About
"Simulation of Urban MObility", or "SUMO" for short, is an open source, microscopic, multi-modal traffic simulation. It allows to simulate how a given traffic demand which consists of single vehicles moves through a given road network. The simulation allows to address a large set of traffic management topics. It is purely microscopic: each vehicle is modelled explicitly, has an own route, and moves individually through the network.

If you download the SUMO package, you will note that it contains further applications besides SUMO. These applications are used to import/prepare road networks and demand data for being used in SUMO, see for a more verbose list.

Features

 * Includes all applications needed to prepare and perform a traffic simulation (network and routes import, DUA, simulation)
 * Simulation
 * Space-continuous and time-discrete vehicle movement
 * Different vehicle types
 * Multi-lane streets with lane changing
 * Different right-of-way rules, traffic lights
 * A fast openGL graphical user interface
 * Manages networks with several 10.000 edges (streets)
 * Fast execution speed (up to 100.000 vehicle updates/s on a 1GHz machine)
 * Interoperability with other application at run-time
 * Network-wide, edge-based, vehicle-based, and detector-based outputs
 * Supports person-based inter-modal trips
 * Network Import
 * Imports VISUM, Vissim, Shapefiles, OSM, RoboCup, MATsim, OpenDRIVE, and XML-Descriptions
 * Missing values are determined via heuristics
 * Routing
 * Microscopic routes - each vehicle has an own one
 * Different Dynamic User Assignment algorithms
 * High portability
 * Only standard c++ and portable libraries are used
 * Packages for Windows main Linux distributions exist
 * High interoperability through usage of XML-data only
 * Open source (GPL)

Usage Examples
Since 2001, the SUMO package has been used in the context of several national and international research projects. The applications included:
 * traffic lights evaluation
 * route choice and re-routing
 * evaluation of traffic surveillance methods
 * simulation of vehicular communications
 * traffic forecast

Included Applications
The package includes:

Additionally, the following unsupported contributions are included:

Several people have extended the SUMO package during their work and submitted their code. If not being a part of the release, these contributions are usually not tested frequently and may be outdated.

Further - closed source - applications and extensions exist and may be used within joined projects. They are:

History
The development of SUMO started in the year 2000. The major reason for the development of an open source, microscopic road traffic simulation was to support the traffic research community with a tool with the ability to implement and evaluate own algorithms. The tool has no need for regarding all the needed things for obtaining a complete traffic simulation such as implementing and/or setting up methods for dealing with road networks, demand, and traffic controls. By supplying such a tool, the DLR wanted to i) make the implemented algorithms more comparable by using a common architecture and model base, and ii) gain additional help from other contributors.

Software design criteria
Two major design goals are approached: the software shall be fast and it shall be portable. Due to this, the very first versions were developed to be run from the command line only - no graphical interface was supplied at first and all parameter had to be inserted by hand. This should increase the execution speed by leaving off slow visualisation. Also, due to these goals, the software was split into several parts. Each of them has a certain purpose and must be run individually. This is something that makes SUMO different to other simulation packages where, for instance, the dynamical user assignment is made within the simulation itself, not via an external application like here. This split allows an easier extension of each of the applications within the package because each is smaller than a monolithic application that does everything. Also, it allows the usage of faster data structures, each adjusted to the current purpose, instead of using complicated and ballast-loaded ones. Still, this makes the usage of SUMO a little bit uncomfortable in comparison to other simulation packages. As there are still other things to do, we are not thinking of a redesign towards an integrated approach by now.