Advanced Calibration of Car-Following Models

Microscopic simulation models have become widely applied tools in traffic engineering. Nevertheless, parameter identification of these models remains a difficult task. This is for one caused by the fact that parameters are generally not directly observable from common traffic data, but also due to the lack of reliable statistical estimation techniques. This paper puts forward a new general approach to identifying parameters of car-following models. The main contribution of the paper is that the approach allows for inclusion of prior information on the parameter values (or the valid range of values) to be estimated. Furthermore, it correctly deals with the serial correlation in the trajectory data. The newly developed approach generalizes the Maximum Likelihood estimation approach pro-posed by the authors, enabling identification of driver-specific car-following parameters using vehicle trajectory data. The approach allows for statistical analysis of the model estimates, including the standard error of the parameter estimates and the correlation of the estimates. Also, we can easily test whether a specific model outperforms the other models using the likelihood-ratio test. A nice property of this test is that it takes into account the number of parameters of a model as well as the performance. To illustrate the workings, the approach is applied to two car-following models of different complexity using vehicle trajectories for a Dutch motorway collected from a helicopter.

• Corporate Authors:

  World Conference on Transport Research Society

  Secretariat, 14 Avenue Berthelot
  69363 Lyon cedex 07,   France 
• Authors:
  • Hoogendoorn, Serge P
  • Ossen, Saskia J L
  • van Lint, Hans W C
• Conference:
  • 11th World Conference on Transport Research
  • Location: Berkeley CA, United States
  • Date: 2007-6-24 to 2007-6-28
• Publication Date: 2007

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 10p
• Monograph Title: 11th World Conference on Transport Research

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Calibration; Car following; Microscopic traffic flow; Traffic data; Traffic engineering; Traffic estimation; Traffic simulation; Vehicle trajectories
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01117528
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Dec 30 2008 12:32PM