Abstract
Industrialization, urban development, and population growth in the last decades caused a significant increase in congestion of transportation networks across the world. Increasing congestion of transportation networks and limitations of the traditional methods in analyzing and evaluating the congestion mitigation strategies led many transportation professionals to the use of traffic simulation techniques. Nowadays, traffic simulation is heavily used in a variety of applications, including the design of transportation facilities, traffic flow management, and intelligent transportation systems. The literature review, conducted as a part of this study, shows that many different traffic simulation packages with various features have been developed to date. The present study specifically focuses on a comprehensive comparative analysis of the advanced interactive microscopic simulator for urban and non-urban networks (AIMSUN) and SimTraffic microsimulation models, which have been widely used in the literature and practice. The evaluation of microsimulation models is performed for the four roadway sections with different functional classifications, which are located in the northern part of Iran. The SimTraffic and AIMSUN microsimulation models are compared in terms of the major transportation network performance indicators. The results from the conducted analysis indicate that AIMSUN returned smaller errors for the vehicle flow, travel speed, and total travel distance. On the other hand, SimTraffic provided more accurate values of the travel time. Both microsimulation models were able to effectively identify traffic bottlenecks. Findings from this study will be useful for the researchers and practitioners, who heavily rely on microsimulation models in transportation planning.
Highlights
Roadway density and traffic congestion substantially increased over the last years across the world, especially near large metropolitan areas, primarily due to rapid industrialization, fast population growth, urban development, and increasing demand for passenger and freight transport [1,2,3,4]
A total of ten replications were used to calculate the average values of the performance indicators within the AIMSUN and SimTraffic microsimulation models in this study
The errors of the microsimulation models in estimating various transportation network performance indicators can be justified by different issues that include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) capability of the adopted car-following models to replicate realistic traffic flow behavior; (2) capability of the adopted lane-changing models to replicate realistic lane-changing maneuvers; (3) network traffic generation accuracy; (4) errors that are associated with the calibration of Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) functions for the considered roadway sections; (5) errors that are associated with the calibration of physical and technical characteristics of a standard passenger car unit; and (6) errors that are associated with the field data collection and estimation of the actual values of the transportation network performance indicators
Summary
Roadway density and traffic congestion substantially increased over the last years across the world, especially near large metropolitan areas, primarily due to rapid industrialization, fast population growth, urban development, and increasing demand for passenger and freight transport [1,2,3,4]. The congestion mitigation alternatives (e.g., adding another lane to a given roadway segment, adjust cycles of traffic signals, build an interchange, implement some of the access management approaches, and others) must be implemented in order to alleviate the increasing congestion issues and serve communities. Transportation planners often tend to use traffic simulation software packages for comparison of various congestion mitigation alternatives. The increasing application of traffic simulation software packages is supported by numerous advancements in computer and software sciences. A simulation analysis of traffic flow is based on specific indices and parameters that must be set within a given software package. The major traffic flow parameters within sim-
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