Identifying And Assessing Key Weather-Related Parameters And Their Impact On Traffic Operations Using Simulation

TRB 2005 Annual Meeting CD-ROM Paper revised from original submittal. ii Adverse weather conditions can have a dramatic impact on the operations and quality of traffic flow. With the advent of advanced traffic management systems (ATMS), there is an opportunity to develop traffic management strategies that seek to minimize the negative weather-related impacts on traffic operations. Although simulation models are widely used in the evaluation of various traffic management strategies, its application to evaluate ATMS strategies under adverse weather conditions needs to be explored. This paper introduces a study conducted at Traffic Research Laboratory to identify how weather events impact traffic operations, assess the sensitivity of weather-related traffic parameters in the CORridor SIMulation (CORSIM) traffic microsimulation model, and develop guidelines for using the CORSIM model to account for the impacts of adverse weather conditions on traffic operations. A high-level conclusion from this project is that CORSIM can adequately be used to model the impacts of weather events on traffic operations. This conclusion is based on the fact that a majority of the generic weather-related parameters identified are currently available in CORSIM, and that the key weather-related parameters are adequatel