California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

Paramics is a suite of high performance software tools used to model the movement and behavior of individual vehicles on urban and highway road networks. The Paramics Project Suite consists of Modeller, Processor, Analyzer, and Programmer. Paramics Programmer is a framework that allows the user to customize many features of underlying simulation model. Access is provided through a Functional Interface or Application Programming Interface (API). The capability to access and modify the underlying simulation model through API is essential for research. Such an API should have a dual role, first to allow researchers to override the simulators default models, such as car  following, lane changing, route choices for instance, and second, to  allow them to interface complementary modules to the simulator.  Complementary modules could be any ITS application, such as signal optimization, adaptive ramp metering, incident management and so on. In this way, new research ideas could be easily tested using simulator before the implementation in the real world.  Three developed APIs are documented in this report; namely, full-actuated signal control, actuated signal coordination, and actuated ramp metering control. Section 2, 3, and 4 will have detailed descriptions for each of them. In each section, the control logic, data structure and control interface, data input requirements, and some implementation considerations are included.