TRAFFIC SIMULATION SOFTWARE COMPARISON STUDY

Currently, many planning agencies rely on regional planning models for analysis of transportation system alternatives. In order to examine the impacts of system alternatives in greater detail, the Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham (RPCGB) expressed interest in exploring the use of microscopic traffic simulation models. This project compared three commercially available traffic simulation software packages: CORSIM version 4.32), SimTraffic (version 5.0), and AIMSUN (version 4.2). Each simulation package was evaluated using the following corridor "types": Interstate, Signalized Principal Arterial, and an Urban Collector. Each package was evaluated according to criteria that included: system requirements, ease of coding, data requirements, relevance/accuracy of performance measures reported in the output, and versatility/expandability. The results indicate that all three models can provide reasonable simulations of traffic operations, although they each offer different capabilities and require varying levels of efforts to code, debug, and calibrate. The three software packages compared each have applications to which they are particularly well suited, and the RPCGB may want to consider a combination of models to address their planning needs.

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