A calibration and validation procedure for microscopic simulation model

Simulation modeling is an increasingly popular and effective tool for analyzing transportation problems that are not amendable to study by other means. For any simulation study, model calibration and validation is a crucial step to obtaining any results from analysis. This paper proposed a systematic, practical procedure for microscopic simulation model calibration and validation. The validity of the proposed procedure was demonstrated visa a case study containing a freeway in Guangdong Province, China using a widely used microscopic traffic simulation model, PARAMICS. The simulation results compared against multiple days of field data to determine the performance of the calibrated model. It was found that the calibrated parameters using the proposed procedure generated performance measures that were representative of the field conditions while the simulation results of the default parameters were significantly different from the field data.