On the Input Sensitivity of METANET Models and the Robustness of Dynamic Calibration

Abstract

While traffic modeling and control rely upon effective calibration of macroscopic traffic simulation models like METANET, recent empirical work shows these models can exhibit severe sensitivity to input noise. This paper explains this phenomenon through a string-stability analysis, demonstrating that a calibrated METANET model can amplify small additive perturbations to boundary conditions along the corridor, causing the simulated state to diverge from the nominal baseline. The input sensitivity in off-nominal cases may compromise the model's capabilities for counterfactual analysis, which is required for use cases of interest like the design of large-scale variable speed limits. To address these issues, this work demonstrates how a dynamic, time-varying approach to calibrate model parameters can achieve robustness and improved accuracy of the resulting macrosimulation. We show analytically that under stated regularity and perturbation assumptions, dynamic calibration achieves a tighter cost deviation bound than static calibration, and we validate this behavior in highway environments with synthetic and real-world data. Ultimately, this can enable more trustworthy traffic simulation and more effective evaluation of control strategies.