Traffic Flow Optimization: Modeling the Inter-Arrival Times for Simulation Model

Abstract

With the growing number of vehicles on the road, traffic flow problems are no longer a local issue; instead, traffic flow optimization has drawn significant interest from researchers all over the world. Studies of discrete-event simulation have been widely used to encounter problems related to traffic flow. Researchers of discrete-event simulation modeling typically tend to use statistical distributions for inter-arrival and process times based on the simulation software's built-in tools. The software tools include Input Analyzer in Arena, Stat::Fit for Promodel, and ExpertFit for FlexSim. However, there are other numerical metrics and concerns that researchers should examine while deciding on the best distribution. This research explores the exponential distribution and compares it to distributions generated by software, then to real data. The square error value is the focus of the comparison. There were 5404 data points collected for the vehicle arriving at six lanes at selected traffic junctions. According to the findings of this study, the commonly used exponential distribution can be utilized to depict the distribution of inter-arrival times as there is no significant difference from the more complex distribution. In future study, researcher can comfortably use exponential distribution instead of using complex distribution.