Jc. Williams et al., SAMPLING STRATEGIES FOR 2-FLUID MODEL PARAMETER-ESTIMATION IN URBAN NETWORKS, Transportation research. Part A, Policy and practice, 29(3), 1995, pp. 229-244
The basic postulate of the two-fluid theory of town traffic relates th
e average speed of moving vehicles to the fraction of moving vehicles
in a street network; both representing averages over all vehicles in t
he network. Data collection to provide estimates of the model paramete
rs to-date has consisted of sampling the network with a test car, repl
icating (as closely as possible) the trip histories of randomly select
ed vehicles in the network. Because the two-fluid model is nonlinear,
it cannot be simultaneously applied at the individual vehicle level an
d the network level, as is shown in this article. However, due to the
practical difficulties in collecting data for all the vehicles in the
network, several potential sampling strategies are identified and are
evaluated with computer simulation. The simulation experiments suggest
that aggregating the trip histories of 10 to 20 test vehicles over 10
to 15 minutes yields parameter estimates very close to the true value
.