Microscopic traffic simulation has been successfully used in evaluation of traffic efficiency and emissions, but not yet widely in studies of traffic safety aspects. This paper will discuss the potential of traffic safety simulation based on experiences from simulation studies in two research laboratories that were using very different types of traffic simulators. TRANSIMS (Transportation Analysis and Simulation System) is a high-speed parallel micro simulator that allows simulation of large metropolitan areas on microscopic level. It utilises synthetic populations to create the traffic demand and cellular automata for high-speed parallel simulation of traffic flows. HUTSIM is a very different kind of microscopic simulator. The object-oriented HUTSIM model is built for very high precision simulation of interactions between vehicles, pedestrians, traffic environment and traffic control. Because the high fidelity of modelling requires lot of computing power, very large networks cannot be simulated. The paper explains the difficulties in introducing safety and behavioural aspects into existing traffic simulation programs. The use of HUTSIM in conflict studies is presented together with the development work carried out. TRANSIMS has been used in the estimate of accidents in large networks and the paper presents this work.
Abstract