Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) is a microscopic and mesoscopic traffic simulator. It is used to accurately and efficiently simulate road and rail traffic based on movements and interferences of cars, pedestrians, trains, and cargo goods. It was mainly developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and its development started in 2001. SUMO has been successfully applied in several real-world use-cases and projects.
SUMO is also widely used by the car-to-car-communication and car-to-infrastructure-communication (C2X) community. Here, it is applied to provide realistic vehicle traces and to evaluate communication applications and protocols in an online loop with a network simulator. For instance, it was used to support simulated in-vehicle telephony behavior for evaluating the performance of GSM-based traffic surveillance.
SUMO is publicly available as an open source project hosted on Sourceforge and on the DLR websites.
The Eclipse SUMO project provides an open microscopic and mesoscopic traffic simulator. It can be used to model, analyse, simulate, optimize and forecast traffic with a focus on:
- Vehicle movements (cars, busses, ...),
- Pedestrian movements,
- Train movements (rail, urban rail, tram, ...),
- Traffic light schedules, and
- Vehicle emissions.
Furthermore, it contains tools to:
- Import network data from various sources, such as OpenStreetMap
- Model traffic demand and traffic assignment,
- Compute routes for vehicles,
- Compute multimodal and intermodal routes for persons in urban areas,
- Dynamically influence the simulation,
- Provide an infrastructure for simulator coupling
Eclipse Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) is a free and open traffic simulation toolsuite. SUMO allows modelling and analyzing intermodal traffic systems, including road vehicles, public transport, cargo logistics and pedestrians. Included with SUMO is a wealth of supporting tools, which handle tasks like route finding, visualization, network import and emission calculation. SUMO can be enhanced with custom models and it provides various APIs to remotely control and influence the simulation.
Traffic simulations facilitate the evaluation of infrastructure changes as well as policy changes before implementing them in the real world. For example, the effectiveness of environmental zones in cities or the efficiency of traffic light control algorithms can be tested and optimized in a traffic simulation before being deployed in the real world.
Eclipse SUMO comprises of a graphical user interface and a variety of external programs for pre- and post-processing. Its core components are:
- SUMO: command line simulation
- GUISIM: simulation with a graphical user interface
- NETCONVERT: network importer
- NETGEN: abstract networks generator
- OD2TRIPS: converter from O/D matrices to trips
- JTRROUTER: routes generator based on turning ratios at intersections
- DUAROUTER: routes generator based on a dynamic user assignment
- DFROUTER: route generator with use of detector data
- MAROUTER: macroscopic user assignment based on capacity functions
- NETEDIT: Visual editor for street networks, traffic lights, detectors, and further network elements
SUMO is developed in C++ and Python. It runs on Windows, Linux and OSX.
The code is currently hosted on Sourceforge under GNU General Public License 3. The majority of the current code base has been developed by the German Aerospace Center, so it can be relicensed under EPL. The remaining minority of the code have been contributed by external contributors. The German Aerospace Center has signed contributor license agreements from each contributor, so that these contributions can be relicensed under any OSI approved license.
External libraries are either Apache License, BSD, MIT, LGPL (such as the Fox toolkit). An extensive list of the current libraries is here.
No trademark has been registered for SUMO, yet.
The demand to model and simulate traffic and mobility patterns is constantly rising. This is a result of a joint effort of the automotive industry and applied researchers to develop modern assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. The development of these vehicles requires a lot of testing and validation before they can be safely operated in urban areas. Simulating the complexity of traffic is an essential prerequisite for thoroughly testing new functionality.
The Eclipse Foundation provides a professional environment (governance, licensing, intellectual property management) for the future development of Eclipse SUMO. These advantages facilitate the usage of an open source traffic simulator as a common platform in the industry. It is a starting point for a vendor-neutral simulation platform for future mobility.
The German Aerospace Centers plans to create a Collaborative Working Group in the Eclipse community in order to coordinate the building of a common simulation platform for future mobility. In addition to the traffic simulator SUMO by DLR, Fraunhofer FOKUS plans to contribute a major part of their simulator coupling and communication simulation toolsuite VSimRTI in another Eclipse project. This would allow users to couple several simulators and run them together with minimal effort. The Heinz Nixdorf Institute plans to contribute a major part of their car-to-car communication simulator Veins in another Eclipse project. Currently, there are also talks with industrial car simulator providers to open source the interfaces to their proprietary products.
These new Eclipse projects (SUMO, VSimRTI, Veins) will be merged in the future (01/2018) with the goal to provide a common platform to precisely simulate the behavior of a single vehicle within the context of various complex traffic situations, including communication protocols. Currently, there is no other simulator toolsuite available which provides a similar set of functionalities.
The German Aerospace Center plans to move SUMO from SourceForge to Eclipse as soon as possible. We hope to have the initial commit accomplished by 06/2017.
The following organisations and companies are heavy users of SUMO and have explicitly expressed interest in this project:
- AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
- Fraunhofer FOKUS
- Heinz Nixdorf Institute
- IPG Automotive
- rFactor Pro
- RISC Software GmbH
- Robert Bosch GmbH
- TESIS DYNAware Technische Simulation Dynamischer Systeme GmbH
- Transport Systems Catapult UK
- VESC Group
- Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft
- ZIP Ingenieurbüro
The code is currently hosted on Sourceforge under GNU General Public License 3. The German Aerospace Center plans to move the entire code base from Sourceforge to Eclipse and change the license to the EPL. The majority of the current code base has been developed by the German Aerospace Center, so it can be relicensed under EPL. The remaining minority of the code have been contributed by external contributors. The German Aerospace Center has signed contributor license agreements from each contributor, so that these contributions can be relicensed under any OSI approved license.
The SUMO toolsuite is very mature and there exists a vivid community with a yearly user conference held in Berlin. Support is currently provided in a very active mailing list.
SUMO is a toolsuite of C++ applications with a variety of python scripts for pre- and post-processing data. It is developed for Windows, Linux and OSX. Thousands of tests are run every night to ensure the quality of the code (see status page). Although SUMO is currently using subversion, it is planned to migrate to git on GitHub.
An extensive list of the current libraries is here.
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