01595694

Component

Traffic micro-simulation models are widely used to evaluate the expected impacts of transportation network improvements, new traffic management policies, and use of new technologies. There is increasing interest in being able to use micro-simulation models to estimate the impact of the proposed improvement/policy/technology on travel time reliability and therefore there is a need to evaluate over the range of conditions expected throughout the year. In many areas, weather is an important source of the variation in traffic stream behavior, and therefore, should be captured within the modelling framework. This paper develops a method to identify a set of weather categories that best describes the different weather regimes that have a statistically significant influence on the traffic stream characteristics. This paper: (1) presents a statistical technique to differentiate similar and different weather-related categories, (2) shows that the order that the weather factors are considered within the categorization scheme impacts the final set of categories, and (3) presents a method to choose the preferred categorization scheme on the basis of the impact on traffic stream characteristics.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AH010 Standing Committee on Surface Transportation Weather.

01584066

16-5819

English

17p

2016

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Methodology; Microsimulation; Statistical analysis; Traffic flow; Travel time; Weather conditions

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2016 Paper #16-5819

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 12 2016 6:33PM