Integrating Regional Travel Forecasting Model and Microscopic Traffic Model to Assist Highway Work Zone Mobility Analysis

Highways and bridges constitute a nation’s ground transportation infrastructure system to meet a society’s mobility needs, whereas their construction activities frequently cause traffic congestions as a result of partial or complete lane closure. Transportation engineers and planners develop traffic management strategies to minimize this congestion situation, and such strategies can be investigated and evaluated by microscopic traffic simulation models. Historically these models have limitations in analyzing large-scale network problems where the route choice is an issue. A recent trend is to apply the Transportation Analysis and Simulation System (TRANSIMS) to highway work zone analysis in a large-scale area, but input data and model calibration and validation for TRANSIMS remain challenging. Considering that existing transportation studies and traffic surveys data provided by most Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are at a macro level, this paper presents a study on developing such an assessment method by integrating regional travel demand forecasting model and microscopic traffic model. In this study, an integrated system was developed upon a platform of a transportation geographical information system (GIST) to embed functions from TRANSIMS. The integrated model was applied in the Ambassador Gateway Reconstruction Project in Detroit to analyze its system-wide work zone mobility impacts.