A simulation model enables abstraction of a real system and permits one to focus on interesting phenomena. At the same time, the results obtained using simulation study are eloquent and useful only if the simulation model closely represents the real world scenario. Many traffic simulators are available in literature (e.g. SUMO, VISSIM, VanetMobiSim, PARAMICS, etc. to name a few) that permit microscopic traffic simulation. However, most of them model lane based traffic movement and homogeneous vehicles. SUMO supports customized vehicle types like two wheelers, three wheelers, cars, etc. However, it enforces lane discipline on all the vehicles, including smaller vehicles (like two wheelers) which is very unrealistic. On Indian roads, large fraction of vehicles are two wheeler and traffic is less lane disciplined. To overcome the limitations of SUMO, and for better modeling of Indian traffic scenario, SiMTraM was developed by the transportation research group at IIT Bombay. SiMTraM divides lane width into multiple strips and assigns road space to vehicles in terms of number of strips, thereby permitting multiple small vehicles to share the lane width. However, SiMTraM was developed by adapting older version of SUMO (version 0.12) and after its development, was not adapted for later versions of SUMO which had many better features for more realistic traffic scenario representation. In our study we redeveloped SiMTraM by adapting SUMO 0.17 version and made it available as open source to the user community. We carried out detailed performance analysis of SUMO 0.17 and the adapted SiMTraM (now onwards called upgraded SiMTraM) with respect to the edge level vehicle flow, speed and flow-speed relationship for various traffic scenarios. The simulation results show that upgraded SiMTraM permits more realistic representation of Indian traffic scenario.
