Microscopic simulation evaluation method on access traffic operation

Cities around the world have long been plagued by traffic congestions. The access to public buildings, such as parking structures, hospitals, schools, hotels is the main bottleneck that frequently causes traffic backups and accidents. One of the major access management strategies is the optimization of traffic operations adjacent to the access point. However, there is not a scientific model to evaluate access management. It is of great importance that a systematic and unbiased evaluation system is established to gauge the effectiveness and safety of traffic optimization around the access point. This study established a microscopic simulation evaluation index system on access traffic optimization, and obtained the required parameters by VISSIM simulations. A comprehensive evaluation method was established by combining an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to determine the level and index weights with gray relational analysis (GRA). We applied our evaluation method to the building park entrance of Tongji University in China and the road near the entrance was suffering terrible traffic congestions. We acquired the relatively best traffic organization scheme in both efficiency and safety aspects through this method. The results show that it is suitable for the design and optimization of traffic organization to ease traffic congestion. This method, not only considered experts’ experience, but also appropriately reduced the uncertainties of human involvement during the evaluation process and improved the applicability of our method.