California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

A procedure for constructing and calibrating a detailed model of a freeway using VISSIM is presented and applied to a 15-mile stretch of I-210 West in Pasadena, California. This test site provides several challenges for microscopic modeling: an HOV lane with an intermittent barrier, a heavy freeway connector, 20 metered onramps with and without HOV bypass lanes, and three interacting bottlenecks. Field data used as input to the model was compiled from two separate sources: loop-detectors on the onramps and mainline (PeMS), and a manual survey of onramps and offramps. Gaps in both sources made it necessary to use a composite data set, constructed from several typical days. FREQ was used as an intermediate tool to generate a set of OD matrices from the assembled boundary flows. The model construction procedure consisted of: 1) identification of important geometric features, 2) collection and processing of traffic data, 3) analysis of the mainline data to identify recurring bottlenecks, 4) VISSIM coding, and 5) calibration based on observations from 3). A qualitative set of goals was established for the calibration. These were met with relatively few modifications to VISSIM's driver behavior parameters (CC-parameters).