Chao Zhang
Chao Zhang is Research Scientist at Google Research. His research interests concentrate on transportation science, systems modeling, and large-scale simulations. He currently focuses on solving large-scale real-world problems by leveraging techniques from simulation, operations research, transportation & logistics, and machine learning.
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Traffic simulations: multi-city calibration of metropolitan highway networks
Yechen Li
Damien Pierce
27th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC) (2024)
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This paper proposes an approach to perform travel demand calibration for high-resolution stochastic traffic simulators. It employs abundant travel times at the path-level, departing from the standard practice of resorting to scarce segment-level sensor counts. The proposed approach is shown to tackle high-dimensional instances in a sample-efficient way. For the first time, case studies on 6 metropolitan highway networks are carried out, considering a total of 54 calibration scenarios. This is the first work to show the ability of a calibration algorithm to systematically scale across networks. Compared to the state-of-the-art simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) algorithm, the proposed approach enhances fit to field data by an average 43.5% with a maximum improvement of 80.0%, and does so within fewer simulation calls.
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Being widely adopted by the transportation and planning practitioners, the fundamental diagram (FD) is the primary tool used to relate the key macroscopic traffic variables of speed, flow, and density. We empirically analyze the relation between vehicular space-mean speeds and flows given different signal settings and postulate a parsimonious parametric function form of the traditional FD where its function parameters are explicitly modeled as a function of the signal plan factors. We validate the proposed formulation using data from signalized urban road segments in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The proposed formulation builds our understanding of how changes to signal settings impact the FDs, and more generally the congestion patterns, of signalized urban segments.
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