Investigation of road intersection operation using micro-simulation technique

Abstract

In developing countries, the traffic composes of both motorized vehicles and non-motorized vehicles using the same road way, hence the resulting traffic system is non-lane based and heterogeneous. The motorized or fast-moving vehicles are mainly bus, cars, CNG driven auto rickshaws, trucks whereas the slow-moving vehicles referred as non-motorized vehicles (NMV) consists of rickshaws and bi-cycle, which is different in driving behavior and shows lack of lane discipline in particular. Even though the proportion of NMV varies from 10-80 percent, it has a major impact on the traffic characteristics and operations at the signalized intersections. NMV not only reduces the roadway capacity and speed of motorized vehicle but also induces congestion at signalized intersections while discharging stream and affects the queue length and delay time.

A review of literature has shown that many simulation model development works had been done on the lane based homogeneous traffic system consisting of motorized vehicles. This paper mainly deals investigation of road intersection operation on signalized intersection through a microscopic simulation modeling approach. In order to calibrate, there are certain parameters that need to be adjusted in order to get results that are close to field data.

A wide range of data had been collected to develop and calibrate the model of the study area. Data related to geometry of the road were collected directly from the field. Two segmented videos of 30 minutes time interval each, total of one hour were recorded to closely observe the current traffic condition and behavior of vehicles and its impact on others. In addition to that, all the dynamic features of the road such as volume, speed, traffic composition, relative flow of traffic in each direction were extracted from the video. After modeling the network and calibrating it, some network performances parameter such as travel time, and delay time for certain travel sections, had been extracted for 600 second simulation run time, from the model, to observe the effect on network performances due to forced behavior of NMV to MV. This research may be used as a good reference to visualize the forced behavior that NMV induces on MV in a road network with the help of Simulation tools VISSIM.