California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This report presents a micro-simulation method to evaluate potential ITS applications. Based on the commercial PARAMICS model, a capability-enhanced PARAMICS simulation environment has been developed through integrating a number of plug- in modules implemented with Application Programming Interfaces (API). This enhanced PARAMICS simulation can thus have capabilities to model not only the target traffic conditions and operations but also various potential ITS strategies. An evaluation study on the effectiveness of potential ITS strategies under the incident scenarios is conducted over a corridor network located at the city of Irvine, California. The potential ITS strategies include incident management, local adaptive ramp metering, coordinated ramp metering, traveler information systems, and the combination of above. Based on the calibrated simulation model, we implement and evaluate these scenarios. The evaluation results show that all ITS strategies have positive effects on the network performance. Because of the network topology (one major freeway with two parallel arterial streets), real-time traveler information system has the greatest benefits among all single ITS components. The combination of several ITS components, such as the corridor control and the combination scenarios, can generate better benefits.