Graphical application for the construction of a simulator of urban vehicular traffic flows

One of the most fundamental problems encountered during the construction of a simulator of urban vehicular traffic flows concerns the method of gathering the data describing the real system. In this paper, we present a graphical application developed for AutoCAD. This application allows to process the images of a vehicular traffic system in AutoCAD. During the graphical processing performed by means of our application, a file describing the system is generated. This file is subsequently read by a procedure which generates the simulator of the system. The images of the traffic system can be acquired by means of several applications available on the Internet, such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Bing, etc. Performing image processing in the context of AutoCAD allows to consistently handle distance measurements in the system, and, in general, to address the problems related to the scale ratios of an image.