Surrogate Measures of Safety at Roundabouts in AIMSUN and VISSIM Environment

Abstract

This paper addresses issues on road safety analysis through microscopic traffic simulation models. The Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM) was applied to read vehicle trajectory files generated by two microsimulators and then calculate surrogate measures of safety. Since safety assessment of any road entity can provide different results based on the microsimulator which is used, the main objective of this research was to estimate the safety performance of three roundabout layouts and compare the conflict events simulated by AIMSUN and VISSIM. The two micro-simulators were used to build the calibrated models of the roundabouts, each fitting the corresponding empirical capacity function. The results provided insights on how to set the SSAM filters in order to have a comparable frequency of conflicts by simulation and examine conditions under which a safety analysis could be independent of the software used.