Libsumo#
The main way to interact with a running simulation is TraCI which gives the complete flexibility of doing cross-platform, cross-language, and networked interaction with sumo acting as a server. One major drawback is the communication overhead due to the protocol and the socket communication. To have a more efficient coupling without the need for socket communication, the TraCI API is provided as a C++ library with the following properties:
- C++ interface based on static functions and a few simple wrapper classes for results which can be linked directly to the client code
- Function signatures similar to TraCI
- Pre-built language bindings for Java and Python (using SWIG)
- Support for other programming languages via SWIG
Limitations#
The following things currently do not work (or work differently than with the TraCI Python client):
- running with sumo-gui
- subscriptions that require additional arguments (except for vehicle.getLeader)
- stricter type checking
- the TraCI client sometimes accepts any iterable object where Libsumo wants a list
- TraCI client may accept any object where Libsumo needs a boolean value
- using traci.init or traci.connect is not possible (you always need to use libsumo.start)
- with traci every TraCIException will generate a message on stderr, Libsumo does not generate this message
Building it#
It currently requires cmake and swig being installed together with the developer packages for Python (and Java if needed), for Windows see Installing/Windows_CMake. You need to (re-)compile sumo yourself under Windows following the remarks above, under Linux see Installing/Linux_Build (it is probably just a matter of calling cmake and make again if you previously did a build without swig). For the python bindings you will get a libsumo.py and a _libsumo.so (or .pyd on Windows). If you place them somewhere on your python path you should be able to use them as described below.
Using libsumo#
Python#
import libsumo
libsumo.start(["sumo", "-c", "test.sumocfg"])
libsumo.simulationStep()
Existing traci scripts can mostly be reused by calling
import libsumo as traci
In case you have a lot of scripts you can also set the environment
variable LIBSUMO_AS_TRACI
to a non empty value which will trigger the
import as above.