Development of a simulation and evaluation environment for a traffic flow analysis system.

A system for analysis of the traffic flow on public streets and highways through the use of Floating Car Data (FCD) relies completely on the number of simultaneously contributing vehicles, a fact that is no barrier for the phases of conception and development but poses a serious issue for the testing of such a system. Especially for smaller institutions or companies where the ability and resources to field the required number of participants is not given which in turn leads to the need for computational support to substitute the use of real vehicles by simulation. This thesis focuses on the task of the design and development of a simulation and evaluation environment for a pre-developed Traffic Flow Analysis System. The objective of this environment is to simulate the behavior of real vehicles on the existing street network including their most relevant characteristics for the purpose of congestion recognition. It is shown how simulation methods can be effectively used to create such an environment while using mathematical methods to model the characteristics of the participating system parts (vehicles) as well as the environmental influence on the external communication components (GPS, Radio)