Calibration of Microscopic Traffic Simulation Models

Microscopic traffic simulations are tools for simulation of traffic in form of individual vehicles. Road types have various traffic characteristics and therefore different models for their traffic simulation and analysis. The Rural Road Traffic Simulator, RuTSim, is a model which was developed by the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, VTI. RuTSim is a microscopic traffic simulator for rural roads. The 2+1 roads are the type of rural roads that allocate 2 lanes to one direction and one lane to the other, with this configuration for the lanes changing sides after a certain distance. In this research a calibration of the current version of RuTSim for 2+1 roads is presented. The project clarifies microscopic traffic simulation models, RuTSim and its specific settings for 2+1 roads, different approaches for calibrating models and finally the calibration process for 2+1 roads in the current version of the RuTSim model.The calibration process provides a better understanding of the specific effects (of the change) of calibration parameters and their role in returning better simulation outputs on traffic of 2+1 roads.