Calibrating Aimsun Next and PTV Vissim for the Assessment of Traffic Flow Quality on Two- and Three-Lange Rural Highways

The German Highway Capacity Manual HBS provides analytical evaluation procedures to assess the quality of service of rural highways. Microscopic traffic flow simulation can be applied as an alternative method if the constraints of the analytical evaluation procedures are not fulfilled.
In this study, practical guidelines and standard parameter sets for the microscopic traffic flow simulation of two- and three-lane rural highways were developed for Aimsun Next and PTV Vissim. For this purpose, artificial rural highway segments, comparable to the models used to develop the procedures in the HBS, are replicated and calibrated based on the speed-flow relationships given in the HBS. The resulting standard parameters can be applied as starting values for calibrating rural highway models in practice.
Both software tools mostly reproduce the speed-flow relationships of the HBS well. The calibration process revealed that the desired speeds, the acceleration behavior, and the speed behavior in curves are most relevant for the traffic flow simulation of rural highways in accordance with the analytical evaluation procedure of the HBS. The best results are achieved with low longitudinal gradients and low percentages of heavy vehicles.
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The validation of the derived standard parameters with field data showed that the simulation results represent the observed speed-flow relationships well. Deviations between the measured and simulated speeds mainly result from local influences, particularly speed limits.