Usage

Installation

Install Python (>=3.7,<=3.9)
Install PlaFoSim from pypi: pip install plafosim

NOTE: The project is developed and tested only on Linux.

Running a Simulation

NOTE: Since PlaFoSim is a command-line interface (CLI) application, running PlaFoSim requires using a shell.

Quickstart

Run PlaFoSim with:

plafosim

You can use PlaFoSim’s help to get a list of available parameters:

plafosim -h, --help

Or, run a simulation with the default configuration (-d):

plafosim -d

Live GUI

You can visualize the simulation via a simple live GUI based on sumo-gui, using the argument gui:

plafosim --gui

More options for the live GUI can be found within the GUI properties section of the help.

NOTE: This requires installation of SUMO (>=1.6.0) and declaration of the SUMO_HOME variable (see documentation).

Advanced Simulation Control

You can use a variety of different parameters to customize the scenario and the simulation itself. E.g., use the parameter vehicles to configure the number of vehicles in the simulation:

plafosim --vehicles 1000

The available parameters are grouped into different categories:

- road network properties
- vehicle properties
- trip properties
- communication properties
- platoon properties
- formation properties
- infrastructure properties
- simulation properties
- GUI properties
- result recording properties

You can find a list of available parameters for each category in the help:

plafosim -h, --help

Examples

# Configure a 100km freeway with ramps at every 10km
plafosim --road-length 100 --ramp-interval 10

# Configure random (normally distributed) desired driving speed of 130km/h
plafosim --random-desired-speed true --desired-speed 36

# Configure random trips for 500 vehicles
plafosim --vehicles 500 --random-depart-position true --random-arrival-position true --depart-desired true

# Pre fill the freeway with 1000 vehicles
plafosim --vehicles 1000 --pre-fill true

# Configure 50% of the vehicles with Advanced Cruise Control (ACC) and a headway time of 1.5s
plafosim --penetration 0.5 --acc-headway-time 1.5

# Enable a simple, distributed platoon formation algorithm [1] in order to form platoons every 30s
plafosim --formation-algorithm SpeedPosition --formation-strategy distributed --execution-interval 30

Faster Simulation

You can speed up the simulation performance by enabling Python’s optimization PYTHONOPTIMIZE, e.g., in order to disable assertions:

PYTHONOPTIMIZE=1 plafosim

See the Python documention for more details.

Re-Playing a Simulation

The simulation can write a trace file including the mobility details of every simulated vehicle (default results_vehicle_traces.csv). You can replay the simulation in the GUI (see above) based on the trace file by using the corresponding binary:

plafosim-replay results_vehicle_traces.csv

To see all options of this script, run:

plafosim-replay -h, --help

NOTE: This requires installation of SUMO (>=1.6.0) and declaration of the SUMO_HOME variable.

Recording of Screenshots and Video from a Simulation

PlaFoSim offers functionality to automatically record a screenshot of the GUI in every simulation step with

plafosim --gui --screenshot-file screenshot

These screenshots can be used to create a video by using an integrated script based on ffmpeg:

plafosim-img2video 'screenshot_*.png' video.mp4

NOTE: This requires installation of ffmpeg.