The main objective of the Action is to develop, implement and promote the use of methods and procedures for supporting the use of traffic simulation models, especially on the topics of model calibration and validation. To this date, the bulk of resources and effort in the field of traffic simulation have focused on “model development”, leading to many simulation models being available on the market. These models are extensively used in applications that have great potential impact on the safety, capacity and environmental efficiency of the road system. However the fidelity of results and conclusions drawn from a simulation study, as well as the range of possible applications the tools can reliably be used for, are questionable: the same simulation study carried out by different people, even when using the same tool, is likely to give different results. Thus, the trustworthiness of the results almost entirely depends on the ability of the model users and on their intuition. Moreover, the increasing complexity of models makes appropriate and correct use a difficult task even for experts, requiring very specific calibration and validation methodologies. For these reasons the main objective of this Action is to develop, implement and promote methodologies and procedures to support the use of traffic simulation, especially on the topics of calibration and validation. To this aim the sharing and exchanging of available traffic datasets will also be a key task of the Action.
Traffic simulation models - model reliability - model calibration and validation - traffic measures estimation - O-D flows estimation
