This work implements and analyses a highway traffic flow simulation based on continuum modeling of traffic dynamics. A traffic-flow simulation was developed and mapped onto a parallel computer architecture. Two algorithms (the 1-step and 2-step algorithms) to solve the simulation equations were developed and implemented. They were then tested on a Cray T3E, a 3-D torroidal mesh with very fast inter-processor communication (IPC) times. Tests with real traffic data collected from the freeway

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... rk in the metropolitan area of Minneapolis, MN were used to validate the accuracy and computation rate of the parallel simulation system. The execution time for a 24-hour traffic-flow simulation over a 15.5-mile freeway, which takes 65.7 minutes on a typical single processor computer, took only 2.39 seconds on the Cray T3E. The 2-step algorithm, whose goal is to trade off extra computation for fewer IPC's, was shown to save more than 5% on computation time. This parallel implementation has proven potential for real-time traffic engineering applications. 0 1 ,..., − . The choice of indices j 0 ,...,j P-1 defines a mapping of the segments to the processors [3, 11].