WSC 2020 Best Contributed Application Paper Award

18.01.2021

 

TUMCREATE would like to extend congratulations to our colleagues from the Area-Interlinking Design Analysis group for winning the Best Contributed Application Paper Award at the Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) 2020 with their manuscript titled "Multi-thread State Update Schemes for Microscopic Traffic Simulation".  The authors are Dr Tan Wen Jun, Dr Philipp Andelfinger, Dr Xu Yadong, Prof Cai Wentong, Prof Alois Knoll, and Dr David Eckhoff. 

 

WSC recognizes contributed papers of exceptionally high quality and implements a stringent process in selecting the winners. Out of 200 accepted contributed papers, four finalists were selected by the track committee. Among the four finalists, the winner was eventually selected by an independent panel of three distinguished members of the simulation community. This academic achievement is a high recognition for the research work by the authors in the simulation field.

 

The paper discusses how in a simulation (e.g., traffic), agents (e.g., vehicles) are advanced in time such that the reproducibility and scalability of the simulation can be supported. This is a critical aspect to address in high-performance simulations where hundreds of thousands of agents are simulated in parallel. The research has already been incorporated into TUMCREATE’s city-scale simulator CityMoS, which is being deployed in various research, government, and industry projects.

 

The panel’s decision was based on the following: “This paper systematically explores the effects of different synchronization and agent update methods on the performance of multi-threaded traffic simulations. Asynchronous and synchronous approaches for updating agent states are compared in terms of locking and conflict resolution requirements and simulation runtime. The results of experiments are clearly and succinctly summarised, providing actionable evidence on how best pursuing when applying parallel computing techniques to traffic simulations.”

 

The Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) is the premier international forum for disseminating recent advances in the field of system simulation, with the principal focus being discrete-event simulation and combined discrete-continuous simulation. In addition to a technical program of unsurpassed scope and quality, WSC provides the central meeting place for simulation practitioners, researchers, and vendors working in all disciplines in industrial, governmental, military, and academic sectors. This year’s theme of WSC is “Simulation Drives Innovation”. Simulation allows us to tackle many complex problems we could not otherwise – which, in turn, allows us to innovate.

 

The authors' version of the paper can be found here: 

https://www.david-eckhoff.net/pdf/tan2020multi.pdf