Transportation Systems Simulation - A Tutorial for Multi-Modal Simulation Using VISSIM/Pedestrian: Simulation Evaluation

Now that the simulation model is ready to be run and viewed, the results can be evaluated. Evaluation will help the user understand the model in order to calibrate the model. Pedestrian travel times are taken from the parking lot origin until the pedestrian returns after shopping. The results are output into a text file that can be converted to an Excel file for analysis.

Place Pedestrian Travel Times
To evaluate the pedestrian travel times, origin and destination travel time measurements need to be placed. For this model, place one at the pedestrian input area and the adjacent final destination area (end of large store to parking route) as shown in the figure below.


 * 1) Click on Pedestrian Travel Times to highlight the network object.
 * 2) Then CTRL + Right Click on the start area and Click on the end area.
 * 3) Type “fulltrip” in the Name column as shown below:

Create Data Collection Output File
The pedestrian travel time placements define where data should be collected but one more crucial step needs to take place before data collection can occur. This is to define data collection during the simulation and output directory. To define data collection outputs use the following procedure:


 * 1) Go to Evaluation > Configuration and Check On the Pedestrian travel times box in the Result Attributes tab (see Figures below).
 * 2) Set the To time and Interval to “7200” and “300” respectively.
 * 3) Then in the Direct Output tab, Check On the pedestrian travel times (raw data) box.
 * 4) Set the To time for each to “7200”.
 * 5) Choose an output directory that will be remembered.

Run Simulation

 * 1) Go to Simulation > Parameters and verify the period is 7200 seconds.
 * 2) Next press the play button to begin (see Figure below), and wait for a few minutes while the simulation runs.
 * 3) As the simulation runs, an .rsrp will be created in the output folder specified in configuration and will be ready when the simulation is over.
 * 4) To create a few data files, run the simulation a few times with a different random seed. This will allow for a greater diversity of random data.

Import Results into Excel
To view the results in the familiar Excel format, the .rsrp file can be imported into Excel.


 * 1) Open a new Excel spreadsheet,
 * 2) Click Data > From Text (see Figure below).  A window will open prompting to choose a file.
 * 3) Go to the folder where you saved the output directory and choose All Files as the file type.
 * 4) Choose the output .rsrp file. This will open the text import wizard.

In the text import wizard Check On Delimited and Click Next. Then Check On Semicolon and Click Next. In the next step Click Finish. Choose cell A1 to place the data. 

The data for each pedestrian will be shown as follows:

This data can be compared to the expected or field collected data. Calibration would involve changing pedestrian speed distributions, routes, or compositions to get the required output data desired to represent the actual conditions.

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