Performance Evaluation of Microscopic Traffic Flow Models with Test Track Data

Abstract

The performance of six microscopic traffic flow models was investigated on the basis of how well these models fit with the real-time kinematic Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements. Ten passenger cars equipped with the GPS receivers participated in the car-following experiments, conducted at a test track. The genetic algorithm-based approach is adopted to optimize the model parameters for two different cases: using speed and headway data. The optimized performance of each model is analyzed for various driving conditions introduced by the different level of disturbances to the lead vehicle's speed, which include half-wave, one-wave, two-wave, three-wave, random, and constant speed patterns. In the former case with speed data, five models performed well with the average percentile error ranging from 3.87% to 4.71% and standard deviation ranging from 1.09% to 1.64%. In the latter case with headway data, only three models performed well with the average percentile error ranging from 12.04% to 12.91% and standard deviation ranging from 4.53% to 5.13%. All models performed better in the former case than in the latter case. The interpersonal variations are significant compared with the intermodel variations and indicate individual drivers' influence on the car-following phenomena.