An Offline Road Network Partitioning Solution in Distributed Transportation Simulation

Offline road network partitioning is the first step to space-parallel distributed transportation simulation. Currently, METIS is the most popular offline road network partitioning solution, but it cannot naturally formalize data distribution in various ITS applications, and cannot guarantee to minimize data exchanges between partitions. This paper introduces a hyper graph-based offline road network partitioning solution, which is suitable for future distributed transportation simulations with ITS applications. In [10], we proposed to formalize offline road network partitioning as a hyper graph partitioning problem, which makes it possible to minimize data exchanges between partitions. We then solved the hyper graph partitioning problem using hMETIS, a graph partitioning algorithm borrowed from Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) applications. In this paper, our experiments based on Singapore road network showed that the hyper graph-based road network partitioning with ITS applications reduces data exchanges between partitions. We observed two features in data distributions in some ITS applications, which led us to develop the biased first choice (BFC) coarsening schema. Experiments show that BFC further reduces data exchanges between partitions. For distributed transportation simulations, where there are large amounts of data exchanged between partitions, especially by ITS applications, our proposal is one candidate solution to reduce the simulation time and increase the scalability.