Repeatability Enhancements of Traffic Simulator by Introduction of Traffic Flow Compensation Methods

A traffic simulator is one of the most effective tools to estimate effects of traffic management and traffic enforcement such as new road construction, detour route guidance for avoidance of traffic accident/earthwork or emergency signal control in the event of a natural disaster. And the aim of simulation is estimation of an assumed situation, and the most important index is the congestion length on the network. Because when there is no congestion length on the roads, the travel time does not increase so much, even if the traffic volume increases. However, there are many difficulties in making simulator results reproduce the actual traffic flow in terms of traffic volume, especially congestion length and travel time. Therefore, the main data and parameters used in a simulator such as OD (Origin Destination) data and flow rate can be tuned only by an experienced engineer and it takes much time. Moreover, this parameter might not be applicable to other analysis. That’s why the techniques of automatic tuning are required. This paper explains one of the repeatability enhancement techniques. The algorithm has been installed to SOUND traffic simulator and it has been utilized at the Traffic Control Center in Tokyo since April 2011.