Fitting Volume Delay Functions under interrupted and uninterrupted flow conditions at Greek urban roads

Abstract

This paper presents the calibration of the most commonly used Volume Delay Functions (VDF): BPR, Conical, Akcelik and Modified Davidson, for an urban area populated by over 1 million inhabitants, the city of Thessaloniki in Greece. The estimation of the unknown coefficients was carried out for a typical freeway, the ring road of the city, and selected arterial and collected roads of the city center, through recent data of hourly observed vehicle speeds and volumes obtained from video recordings and loop detectors. The BPR function yielded the highest accuracy across all the examined road sections and was characterized as the most suitable to simulate and interpret the existing traffic conditions. The estimated coefficients differed significantly from the values proposed in the pertinent literature, which highlights the importance of using locally derived data for the calibration of the VDFs.