Development and Evaluation of a Procedure for the Calibration of Simulation Models

Microscopic traffic simulation models have been playing an important role in the evaluation of transportation engineering and planning practices for the past few decades, particularly in cases in which field implementation is difficult or expensive to conduct. To achieve high fidelity and credibility for a traffic simulation model, model calibration and validation are of utmost importance. Most calibration efforts reported in the literature have focused on the informal practice, and they have seldom proposed a systematic procedure or guideline for the calibration and validation of simulation models. This paper proposes a procedure for microscopic simulation model calibration. The validity of the proposed procedure was demonstrated by use of a case study of an actuated signalized intersection by using a widely used microscopic traffic simulation model, Verkehr in Staedten Simulation (VISSIM). The simulation results were compared with multiple days of field data to determine the performance of the calibrated model. It was found that the calibrated parameters obtained by the proposed procedure generated performance measures that were representative of the field conditions, while the simulation results obtained with the default and best-guess parameters were significantly different from the field data.