Evaluations of traffic simulation models: CORSIM and SimTraffic

Traffic simulation is a powerful tool that provides transportation engineers with the ability to test the feasibility and performance of a system before it is implemented and also helps in optimizing the proposed system. This thesis focus on the comparison of two most commonly used traffic simulation models: CORSIM (Version 5.1) and SimTraffic (Version 5.0). Synchro (version 5.0) was used as preprocessor for this research.; The comparison was divided into two sections: general comparison and output comparison. General comparison includes the following criteria: core algorithm logics used for each model, System requirement, Model capability/Features, Data requirement, Interoperability of input/output with other traffic analysis software, Ease of coding, Cost and Animation. The output comparison was evaluated using two surface street networks in Halifax. It was found that both CORSIM and SimTraffic can produce reasonable results after careful calibration, all Measure of Effectiveness (MOE) compared closely with each other, but each model has its own strengths and weaknesses that make it suitable for certain applications. SimTraffic was found easy to code and calibrate, but CORSIM can model more comprehensive traffic situations than SimTraffic.