Developing Calibration Tools for Microscopic Traffic Simulation Final Report Part II: Calibration Framework and Calibration of Local/Global Driving Behavior and Departure/Route Choice Model Parameters

The central goal of this research is to develop a systematic framework and the support tools to ease, streamline and speed up the calibration of micro simulation projects. Part II of the final report documents the accomplishments achieved in the first phase of the research project(a review of practice and calibration guidelines is documented in a Part I). These accomplishments include: 1) developed a calibration framework that decouples the calibration process into five components: project scoping and error checking, global parameter calibration, local parameter calibration, departure/route (D-R) choice parameter calibration, and global calibration, 2) developed GA-based calibration tools for local and global parameters, as well as D-R choice parameters, 3) integrated the developed tools into one user-friendly graphical interface, and 4) tested the developed methods and tools on synthetic and real networks. It is shown by working examples that the developed tools can help achieve satisfactory calibration results with much less human intervention as found in the commonly practiced trial-and-error calibration procedure.