A 3-D Traffic Animation System with Storm Surge Response

This paper presents a 3D traffic animation system that provides features of vehicle interaction and storm surge response to emulate realistic scenarios in a hurricane affected area. The proposed system constructs road objects based on a series of line segments. Vehicles on the roads are animated by keeping them coherent with the direction of the road segment and adjusting their speeds with respect to one another. The vehicle speed is controlled based upon a collision-circumventing policy and they automatically respond to flood water caused by a storm surge. The system can automatically plant lamp posts along the roads, which also respond to surge flooding. An implementation conducted with the 3D scenes on a couple of south Florida's surge-susceptible areas demonstrates the system's excellence in animating real traffic scenes and impacts of storm surge on coastal regions.