Simulation driven design of the german toll system — Evaluation and enhancement of simulation performance

We study the performance issues of a realistic simulation of the German toll system for heavy trucks using a discrete-event system (DES) simulation. The article first introduces the German toll system and the simulation framework developed to analyze the systems´ behavior. A number of performance limitations of several commercial and non-commercial DES simulation kernels are described, measured and benchmarked. The application-level performance of a DES implementation of the German toll system is then compared using two commercial DES tools and several optimizations are introduced both on the simulation model and kernel level to achieve the necessary performance for a detailed and realistic simulation of a fleet of 700 000 trucks.