Adaptation of VISSIM, a dynamic simulation model, to the traffic behavior at intersections in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico

The rapid evolution in the sophistication of microsimulation models has encouraged their use in transportation engineering and planning. Traffic In Towns SIMulation (VISSIM as its acronyms in German) is a microsimulation model used for the design of traffic actuated control systems. The main objective of this research is to validate the VISSIM program for Puerto Rican driving-behavior environment due to the fact that this program was developed and validated for Germany's traffic behavior. The environment and traffic rules in Germany are different with respect to Puerto Rico's. Part of this research is to adapt the microsimulation commercial software, "VISSIM" to these differences, and to determine its ability to represent the traffic behavior at major arterial street intersection conditions in Puerto Rico.; The test bed is a thirteen (13)-kilometer (8.1 miles) corridor located on highway PR-2 between the municipalities of Mayaguez and Anasco. The arterial network was divided in two different segments taking into consideration the geometric characteristics of each segment. Data were collected in the selected intersections for both, providing the necessary input to the simulation and comparing the results obtained. After performing the simulation, statistical analysis was performed to study how this microsimulation tool represents Puerto Rico's traffic conditions. The results obtained using statistical analysis show that there is no significant difference between the output obtained in the simulation with VISSIM and the field studies at the 95% confidence level.