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arXiv · 2608.19642

The Calibration Illusion in Traffic Microsimulation

Cameron Hickert·Maryam Samaei·Athena Wang·Chengyuan Zhang·Lijun Sun·Yanbing Wang·Mostafa Ameli·Cathy Wu
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Abstract

The transportation community seeks to use calibration methods for highway traffic microsimulation. This is a response to the time-consuming and subjective nature of traditional manual calibration, as well as the growing prevalence of data for calibration. This work argues that this "automatic" calibration is largely an illusion. A significant - and unquantified - amount of bespoke manual work is hidden behind these methods. This illusion inhibits a core component of scientific advancement: objective comparison against a shared standard. This impedes evaluation, undermines reproducibility, and fragments research. To address this gap, this paper introduces a comprehensive benchmark designed to simultaneously expose the calibration illusion for highway microsimulation and provide a common ruler. The results across a range of scenarios present a new baseline for what the algorithms can achieve without bespoke tuning, revealing the research gap that remains and providing a tool to advance a cumulative science of calibration. Additional experiments provide insights into the source of calibration errors that arise in large-scale highway calibration relative to the simplified settings under which methods are commonly developed.

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BibTeXRIS

Cameron Hickert, Maryam Samaei, Athena Wang, Chengyuan Zhang, Lijun Sun, Yanbing Wang, Mostafa Ameli, Cathy Wu. 2026-08-20. The Calibration Illusion in Traffic Microsimulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19642

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