01029829

Component

Gap acceptance is a process that occurs in different traffic situations, such as to cross a road, to enter a roundabout or to perform an overtaking maneuver on a bi-directional road. The minimum gap that a driver will accept is generally called the critical gap. Mathematical representations of the gap acceptance process are an important part of for instance traffic simulation models. For a more realistic representation, these mathematical descriptions have become more complex, including behavior parameters, such as ‘impatience’ or ‘aggressiveness’. Since these parameters influence gap acceptance behavior, they should therefore be included in critical gap distribution estimations. This paper presents a new simulation-based approach to estimate distribution of critical gaps. The proposed, so called, KS-GA method enables estimation of other behavior parameters simultaneously with the critical gap distribution parameters. The approach is based on minimization of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance between the simulated and observed accepted gaps, and the simulated and observed rejected gaps. The optimization is performed using a Genetic Algorithm. By applying the approach to synthetic data, the model is verified. The estimation results of the KS-GA method are comparable to the performance of the maximum likelihood procedure; a well accepted and frequently applied critical gap distribution estimation method. If intra-driver changes are included, the KS-GA method performs better. The KS-GA method is applied using real life overtaking gap acceptance data on a bi-directional two-lane road.

01020180

06-0594

English

17p

2006

Transportation Research Board 85th Annual Meeting

CD-ROM

Figures (4) ; References

Behavior; Genetic algorithms; Traffic simulation

Critical gaps (Traffic); Distribution of critical gaps; Kolmogorov-smirnoff test

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; I71: Traffic Theory

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2006 Paper #06-0594

TRIS, TRB

Mar 3 2006 10:24AM