This article looks at the background to, and development of the European project OSSA to develop a tool to enable the best features of existing traffic simulators to become more accessible and more easily interfaced to existing traffic control systems, and which would support re-use of collected data and models. Increasing traffic congestion leads to the need for road development projects but increasingly microsimulators are being used in advance for planning, training, visualising and exploring variations in demand. Running simulations involves creating a road network model and traffic demand model, creating traffic plans and setting start and termination conditions for each simulation run, running the simulation and observing results, creating a new target scenario incorporating change, and using the visualised results to explore the consequences of the change. Existing European projects supporting OSSA are described in brief. For the covering abstract see ITRD E118381.
Abstract