Issues and Solutions to Macroscopic Traffic Dispersion Modeling

Abstract

The paper improves upon the Yu and Van Aerde calibration procedure of the TRANSYT-7F platoon dispersion model, particularly for time steps greater than 1 s in duration, and develops three generalized platoon dispersion models that explicitly account for the effect of the time step duration on traffic dispersion. The paper then validates these models utilizing two datasets: the first includes field data gathered in Montréal, while the second was generated using INTEGRATION microscopic traffic-simulation software. The results demonstrate that the predicted flow profile using the proposed platoon dispersion models provides a good fit to field-observed and simulated profiles, regardless of the modeling time step considered.