FUSION POWER: COMBINING THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS FOR BETTER TRANSPORT SIMULATION

摘要

Instead of viewing today's various modeling tools as separate and incompatible entities, a more effective method is to integrate them and start to regard each individual component as part of an overall toolbox. For decades now, transport engineers have been increasingly relying on the use of mathematical models and specialist software for analyzing the performance of current and future transportation networks. Macroscopic software packages (generally based on static paradigms) pioneered the field, and were followed later by more disaggregated and dynamic models. Benefiting from the steadily increasing availability of affordable computing power, these more detailed models have become the tool of choice for operational studies, commonly in the form of microscopic simulators. Among other dynamic models, mesoscopic ones have more recently started to receive attention as a viable and interesting compromise between the macro and micro levels. With the introduction of new technologies, data of unprecedented quantity, detail and ultimately quality is set to become available - making nanoscopic models a viable future prospect and an interesting direction for various forms of research.