  Traffic simulation software is becoming increasingly popular as more cities
worldwide use it to better manage their crowded traffic networks. An important
requirement for such software is the ability to produce accurate results in
real time, requiring great computation resources. This work proposes an
ASIC-based hardware accelerated approach for the AIMSUN traffic simulator,
taking advantage of repetitive tasks in the algorithm. Different system
configurations using this accelerator are also discussed. Compared with the
traditional software simulator, it has been found to improve the performance by
as much as 9x when using a single processing element approach, or more
depending on the chosen hardware configuration.
