A Comparison of Phase Transitions Produced by PARAMICS, TransModeler, and VISSIM

Increasing efforts are devoted to test and improve the performance of commercial traffic simulation software now. However, most previous approaches emphasized microscopic car-following and lane-changing features but neglect the macroscopic traffic dynamics. In this paper, we compare the traffic flow phase transition behaviors of three popular simulation software: PARAMICS 6.5, TransModeler 2.0 and VISSIM 5.1 on a single yet typical scenario. Our testing re-sults show that their slight differences in microscopic models can be appropriately magnified and intuitively displayed in the phase diagram.