Car following model for urban signalised intersection to estimate speed based vehicle exhaust emissions

Transportation sector is the major contributor to air pollution through vehicle exhaust emissions caused by rapid growth of urbanization in India. It is essential to estimate vehicle exhaust emissions precisely to implement effective control strategy beneficial for pollution reduction. Traffic simulation is a useful approach for analyzing dynamic traffic conditions associated with heterogeneity. VISSIM is a microscopic traffic simulation tool widely used to model real traffic conditions and to estimate speed based vehicle emissions. VISSIM model follows the car following model for simulating driving behavior parameters of an individual vehicle class. VISSIM's add on module EnViVer is used for estimating emissions through microscopic approach. This paper presents traffic simulation and emission modelling approach for a signalised intersection of Vadodara city in India. Traffic volume and speed profile of test vehicles have been collected for the selected route of the city. Calibration and Validation of model are achieved through standard performance measures. To observe the effect of vehicle compositions and signal green interval time on emissions, different models have been generated and their respective emissions are estimated. The result indicates that by changing vehicle composition and signal green interval time, emissions reduce significantly as 25.54% CO2, 6.69% NOx and 25.59% PM10.