Tunnel Load Simulator: electricity demand of road tunnels, Monte Carlo web app

Cyril Voyant · Updated 2026-10-18

Open the simulator
Free hosting: the app may take about a minute to wake up on first visit.

How much electricity does a road tunnel use, and how uncertain is it? The Tunnel Load Simulator generates realistic time series of power and energy demand from the tunnel's geometry, operating context, traffic-driven ventilation, lighting regime and random disturbances such as pollution episodes and accidents. It runs N independent Monte Carlo realisations and returns median, P10 and P90 values of the key indicators, with an uncertainty envelope on the time series.

Fast: the engine is fully vectorised. One year at 10-minute resolution simulates in about 150 ms; 20 Monte Carlo runs in about 0.6 s.

What you get

• Annual energy (MWh), peak and mean power (kW), load factor, specific consumption (kWh/m/year) and event counts, for each run and as distributions.
• Interactive charts and CSV export of the time series.
• A Python package usable without the interface (run_monte_carlo(...)), with examples and tests.

Typical uses

• Pre-design sensitivity studies: lighting technology, ventilation type, traffic level.
• Synthetic load profiles for research on energy management and renewable integration in tunnels.
• Teaching Monte Carlo uncertainty on an engineering case.

Status: first-order synthetic generator, suited to prototyping, demonstrations and pre-design sensitivity studies. Calibrate against measured data before any engineering or publication use.

SmartTunnel project and citation

Developed in the SmartTunnel research collaboration between Haytham El-Houari (Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fès, Morocco) and Cyril Voyant (Mines Paris – PSL, O.I.E.). Cite: H. El-Houari, C. Voyant, Tunnel Load Simulator, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20080043.

Source code (MIT) · Also usable in plain language through WebSemantic.