Calibration of Car-Following Models Considering the Impacts of Warning Messages from Tablet/Smartphone Application

The phenomenon of car-following is special in traffic operations. Traditional car-following models can well describe the reactions of the movements between two concessive vehicles in the same lane within a certain distance. With the invention of connected vehicle technologies, more and more advisory messages are in development and applied in our daily lives, some of which are related to the measures and warnings of speed and headway distance between the two concessive vehicles. Such warnings may change the conventional car-following mechanisms. This paper intends to consider the possible impacts of in-vehicle warning messages to improve the traditional car-following models, including the General Motor (GM) Model and the Linear (Helly) Model, by calibrating model parameters using field data from an arterial road in Houston, Texas, U.S.A. The safety messages were provided by a tablet/smartphone application. One exponent was applied to the GM model, while another one applied to the Linear (Helly) model, both were on the stimuli term “difference in velocity between two concessive vehicles”. The calibration and validation were separately conducted for deceleration and acceleration conditions. Results showed that, the parameters of the traditional GM model failed to be properly calibrated with the interference of in-vehicle safety messages, and the parameters calibrated from the traditional Linear (Helly) Model with no in-vehicle messages could not be directly used in the case with such messages. However, both updated models can be well calibrated even if those messages were provided. The entire research process, as well as the calibrated models and parameters could be a reference in the on-going connected vehicle program and micro/macroscopic traffic simulations.