California has long recognised the potential for applying electronic and other transportation systems technologies to address the significant mobility and economic challenges in the state, and the rest of the nation. Through an aggressive Advanced Transportation Systems Program, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are being researched, built, and tested for deployment. These ITS will address today s transportation needs and those of the twenty-first century. An important element of this program is the California Advanced Transportation Management Systems Testbed (California ATMS Testbed) located in Orange County, California. The Testbed is an integrated approach to the development and deployment of advanced technologies in the management of urban transportation. Its operation is based on realtime, computer assisted traffic management and communication. Management responsibility for the development and implementation of the Testbed is vested in the University of California at Irvine (Institute of Transportation Studies), being the microscopic traffic simulator, Paramics, the primary simulator tool for the Testbed development environment. Paramics is a shell or framework for a comprehensive and extensive transportation simulation laboratory. Paramics offers important and unprecedented features, such as high performance and scalability, to handle realistic real world traffic networks under ITS. Nevertheless, Paramics has its own limitations, particularly relating to the model s ability to interface with dynamic O-D estimation. This Work addresses the continuing effort to expand the Paramics capabilities, particularly with the dynamic O-D estimation problem, making it a more complete tool to evaluate the expected net benefits of ATMS applications. (Author/publisher)
Abstract