Comparison of traffic simulation models : a case study-NETSIM, NETFLO1 and NETFLO2

This research was an attempt to compare the outputs from TRAF-NETSIM, NETFLO1 and NETFLO2 traffic simulation models. The three models adopt different approaches to simulate traffic on an urban street network. Four different scenarios of traffic network with varying network layout and intersection geometries were simulated by the three models at three different volume levels. The average networkwide speed and delay outputs from the three models were compared for each scenario. Analysis of Variance techniques were used for statistical analyses. The execution speed of the models were also compared. The major finding of this study was that the outputs from the three models were significantly different at each level of comparison. The speed values generated by NETSIM were found to be the lowest whereas NETFLO2 values were highest. NETFLO1 values were always in the middle. In most cases, NETFLO1 values were more closer to NETFLO2 than to NETSIM values. Identical results were found from the analysis of delay values. NETFLO2 was found to be the fastest of the three models whereas NETSIM was the slowest. The execution speed of NETFLO2 was found to be drastically higher than NETSIM. Even NETFLO1 was found to be much faster than NETSIM. There was a significant trade-off between the statistics generated by these models and their execution speeds.