abstreet/docs/design/sim.md

3.4 KiB

General simulation-related design notes

Spawning agents

Ideally, each method would return a future that would do stuff, right? But the mutations need to be done serially. So I think each sim's method should take the path outright, not even start/end. Stick the rng work in sim for the moment. This should let the start/goal selection and the parallelization of paths happen at a more outer layer, in the sim aggregator.

... and now for scenarios / spawners. these get to run every step, trying to introduce new things in the different simulations. if a parked car can't currently begin departing, it'll keep trying every tick.

Notes on determinism

  • serde tricks
  • unit tests

Modeling choices

Don't model sidewalk crowdedness or bike rack availability, because in practice, these things are never scarce resources or problematic. Finding a parking spot is difficult and impacts the quality of one trip and causes externality, so we should model that.

Trips

Time to get even more multi-modal / multi-phase!

  • all trips begin and end at a building

  • spawn peds at a building, make them first traverse the front path.

    • could model another type of On
    • or, just have a special state in the walking sim, just like the driving sim has a temporary parking/unparking state
  • the walking layer shouldnt care about the next layer of the trip. just tell master sim when a ped has reached a bldg or a parking spot, as desired.

  • need to draw the FSM for all of this!

maybe need to organize structs/enums a little...

ParkingSpot - change this to just lane and spot idx, move other stuff to queries for ParkingSim, make it copyable CarParking - rename to ParkedCar SidewalkSpot - this should cache lane and distance. :)

Scenarios

Awkward to turn neighborhoods into buildings/streets; we kind of need the quadtree and stuff for that, which is the Renderable layer right now. Originally there was a separate geometry layer, probably for stuff like this.

Scores

Alright, getting much closer to this being a game! Let's return to the idea of utility functions for agents.

  • everyone cares about total trip time
  • everyone kind of cares about time spent waiting at intersections
  • drivers (anybody using a car for part of their trip)
    • easiness of parking... partly this is time spent walking (from start bldg or to goal bldg), and partly time spent driving after initially reaching destination lane
  • bikes (woops, not implemented yet :P)
    • climbing up hills
    • amount of time on busy roads
      • dedicated lanes are fine
      • even dedicated lanes too close to parking are bad -- stress from possibiliy of being doored
      • driving lanes with few actual cars passing are bad
  • peds
    • hills up OR down
    • amount of greenery along route
    • amount of amenities like cafes along route
    • Seattle greenways had more factors that make a road pleasant or not

Per agent, this score is some kind of a linear combination of factors. Coefficients vary per agent -- some people like hills, don't care about busy roads, etc.

But let's start super simple: just track total trip time for all agents. What's the live UI view we want?

  • per population type (peds, drivers), number of pending and completed trips. sum score so far (can use time so far for pending trips)
    • note that sum score alone is a bit meaningless, even between population types. need to A/B test to meaningfully compare.
  • In headless mode, print scores at the end
  • in UI, have an optional OSD to pop up on the right with scores so far