John Hourdakis, Panos G. Michalopoulos, Jiji Kottommannil
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota.

Transportation Research Board 2003 Annual Meeting

Abstract

As employment of simulation is becoming wide spread in traffic engineering practice, questions about the accuracy and reliability of its results need to be addressed convincingly. A major criticism related to this is proper calibration of the simulation parameters as well as validation which is often not performed, or dealt with in an ad-hoc fashion. This paper presents a complete, systematic and general calibration methodology for obtaining accuracy needed in high performance situations. A technique for automating a significant part of the calibration process through an optimization process is also presented. The methodology is general and is implemented on a selected simulator to demonstrate its applicability. The results of the implementation in two freeway sections of reasonable size and complexity in which detailed data were collected and compared to simulated results, demonstrate the effectiveness of the manual calibration methodology. For instance, through calibration the average volume correlation coefficient on 21 detecting stations improved from 0.78 to 0.96. Comparable results were obtained with the automated calibration procedure with significant time savings and reduced effort.

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