drawtonomy and Eclipse SUMO
Not a comparison — different domains
Section titled “Not a comparison — different domains”drawtonomy and Eclipse SUMO are not competing tools. They operate in different domains:
- drawtonomy — a 2D browser whiteboard for individual driving scenes (a lane merge, an intersection, a cut-in). Outputs OpenSCENARIO 1.3 + OpenDRIVE 1.8 + Lanelet2 OSM.
- SUMO — a microscopic traffic simulator from DLR and the Eclipse Foundation. Models traffic flow across entire city networks. Its netedit is the bundled visual network editor.
The two tools could conceptually share data through OpenDRIVE — SUMO has OpenDRIVE import / export and drawtonomy emits OpenDRIVE 1.8 — but they are aimed at different problems.
What SUMO + netedit covers
Section titled “What SUMO + netedit covers”Per the SUMO documentation:
- Microscopic, vehicle-by-vehicle traffic simulation.
- netedit: visual network editor for edges, lanes, junctions, connections, and traffic lights.
- Static and actuated traffic-signal plan editing.
- Demand modeling — vehicles, flows, public transport, pedestrians.
- Multiple edit modes: Network, Demand, and Data supermodes.
- Unlimited undo / redo, search / selection interface.
- Open-source (Eclipse Public License 2.0).
- Wide use in academic transportation research and traffic engineering.
For traffic-flow modeling and city-scale network simulation, SUMO is the standard open-source option.
How drawtonomy fits
Section titled “How drawtonomy fits”drawtonomy doesn’t simulate traffic flow, doesn’t model demand, and isn’t aimed at city-scale networks. It sketches one scene at a time.
If you work with SUMO:
- drawtonomy can produce a 2D top-down figure of a specific intersection or scene for a paper, slide, or report alongside SUMO-based traffic studies.
- The OpenDRIVE export could in principle feed into SUMO’s network format, though the OpenDRIVE coverage in drawtonomy is partial (no junction primitives yet — see the exporter roadmap). For real network authoring for SUMO, netedit is the right tool.
The two tools serve different purposes. They don’t replace each other.
Part of the broader open ecosystem
Section titled “Part of the broader open ecosystem”SUMO is a long-standing pillar of the open-source transportation simulation community, and its OpenDRIVE interoperability connects it to the ASAM tooling world that drawtonomy also touches. Both projects benefit from the broader open standards work — ASAM OpenDRIVE on one side, OpenStreetMap and the Eclipse Foundation on the other. The autonomous-driving and traffic-engineering communities increasingly overlap, and tools like SUMO, drawtonomy, CARLA, esmini, and the Autoware ecosystem all benefit from that convergence.