Developing Calibration Tools for Microscopic Traffic Simulation Final Report Part 1: Overview Methods and Guidelines on Project Scoping and Data Collection

This report, the first of a three-part series, documents the findings of the first two tasks of Task Order 5308, “Developing Calibration Tools for Microscopic Simulation”, namely a review of literature and the development of certain guidelines for properly scoping a microscopic simulation project and coding its network to minimize coding errors. A wide range of transportation applications of microsimulation is reviewed, paying particularly attention to their calibration efforts. The review revealed that many studies paid little attention to model calibration, or at least not documented it if a detailed calibration effort was carried out. And among the studies that performed model calibration, the calibration procedures employed are quite ad hoc, often relying on trial-and-error. The report identified three calibration issues to be addressed in future work: the lack of a systematic calibration procedure, the lack of automated calibration tools, and the lack of reliable O-D trip demands. This report also examined four important aspects of model development, namely project planning, network coding, data collection and processing, and traffic demand estimation, Guidelines for project planning, network coding, and data collection and preparation, synthesized from various sources including our own calibration experiences, are also provided.