Evaluation of Accuracy of Traffic Flow Generation in SUMO

A traffic simulation of the Jianghan Zone in Wuhan, China was carried out. In order to simulate genuine traffic flow without traditional hard-to-implement data collection methods, geographic population distribution data were gathered from the public information and traffic flow was generated by ActivityGen in SUMO (Simulation of Urban Mobility). For the sake of discovering the accuracy of the simulated traffic, real-time road condition and traffic prediction based on previous data on same time of each road in this area was compared. The results show that traffic flow generated from geographic population distribution data has referential meanings and with more detailed model classification, simulated traffic data can be closer to real conditions. This may offer a new way to generate traffic flow for researchers working in traffic simulation area. Further improvement of the accuracy in traffic flow generation by geographic population needs to pay more attention on special places like hospital and train stations.