Fluid-dynamical and microscopic description of traffic flow: a data-driven comparison

Kurzfassung

A lot of work has been done to compare traffic flow models with reality; so far, this has been done separately for microscopic as well as for fluid-dynamical models of traffic flow. This paper compares directly the performance of both types of models to real data. The results indicate, that microscopic models on average seem to have a tiny advantage over fluid-dynamical models, however one may admit that for most applications the differences between the two are small. Furthermore, the relaxation time of the fluid-dynamical models turns out to be fairly small, of the order of two seconds, and are comparable with the results for the microscopic models. This indicates that the second order terms are weak, however, the calibration results indicate that the speed equation is in fact important and improves the calibration results of the models.