Calibration and validation of microscopic models of traffic flow

Because microscopic models are heavily used in applications, the appropriate calibration and validation of these models have been a recent concern. The contribution of this paper is to compare some of these models by calibrating and validating them with data from double loop detectors on a multilane freeway. To simplify this task, the models were tested by simplifying the multilane reality to a simulation of only a single lane. The results show that by simulating the multilane road with single-lane models, calibration errors (Theil's U-value, or the root mean square error) of 14% to 16% were obtained. A validation of the models, which was done by taking the calibrated parameters of one data set to reproduce the other data sets, gives additional errors of about 0.5 to 2.5 percentage points. This is in good agreement with other calibration and validation approaches performed recently.