A Unified Perspective on Traffic Flow Theory, Part III: Validation and Benchmarking

Over more than half a century, traffic flow theorists have been pursuing two goals: (1) simple and efficient models to abstract vehicular traffic flow and (2) a unified framework in which existing traffic flow models fit and relate to each other. Continuing these efforts, we report our humble understanding in a trio of papers. The first paper (Part I) introduced a Field Theory with an emphasis on traffic flow modeling at the microscopic level. The second paper (Part II) uses the Field Theory as a framework to relate existing microscopic and macroscopic models to each other and summarizes the relations in a Unified Diagram. This paper (Part III) provides numerical and empirical results of the Field Theory and benchmarks some traffic flow models presented in the Unified Diagram.