The overall model-building process is illustrated in this figure:
As the figure shows:
- Information about the corridor comes from various sources and different years and needs to be checked in a pre-processing step. Does it look reasonable (i.e., not garbled or fragmentary)? Is it fairly consistent? Does it seem usable for the intended purpose?
- After the initial checks, the data is processed to produce the information needed for modeling and simulation, including
- Some of the processed data is used to construct the model, some to calibrate the model, and some to validate the model’s simulation results against observed traffic conditions.
- The completed model can be used to simulate traffic conditions along the corridor under various operational conditions, such as no incident, an incident with no intervention, and an incident with intervention.