1 SPARC 2010 Evaluation of Car-following Models Using Field Data

Traffic congestion problems have been recognised as a serious problem in all large urban areas. It significantly reduces in urban mobility. Therefore, it has become a major concern to the transportation and business community and to the public in general. Different techniques have been proposed to alleviate this problem. One of these is Traffic simulation technique. It has been used effectively because they can represent real life, to some extent, and apply different strategies without the need to make physical change on site before implementing such strategies. Car-following models represent the basic unit that governs the longitudinal movement for each traffic simulation model. The efficiency of a traffic simulation model does mainly depend on its core units: car-following and lane changing. In this study, three car-following models (namely, CARSIM, WEAVSIM and PARAMICS) were tested. The first two of these models were rebuilt using Visual Compact FORTRAN Version 6.5. The models were tested using three different sets of data from single lane traffic. These sets of data have been collected using two different methods of collecting data from three regions. In addition, different traffic conditions have been included in this data such as high speed, low speed and “stop and go conditions”. The results indicated that CARSIM gave the most accurate representation of real life situations. Therefore, the assumptions of this model were adopted in a newly developed model to represent traffic behaviour in weaving sections to evaluate the factors affecting the weaving capacity