A comparative study of SYNCHRO 10.0 and SIDRA 8.0 across signalised intersections in Babil city.

Traffic jams at intersections have become increasingly common due to the increasing volume of traffic in recent years. Utilizing traffic simulation software to look for appropriate control methods aims to develop an efficient solution to the problem; however, different simulation programs may produce various evaluation results. The focus of this paper is on two simulation programs, SYNCHRO 10.0 and SIDRA 8.0 PLUS, in order to investigate the main differences between the two programs and thus select the program most representative of traffic movement at signalization intersections for further development. To achieve this goal two signalized intersections were selected in the city of Babil. The three main subjects of discussion in this work are thus a comparison of actual delay time and the delay time produced by each program, the software delay values versus the actual delay values after calibration of the basic saturation flow rate for all approaches, and the observed delay versus the predicted delay in each case. The selected software packages were also used to evaluate the actual delay times in various research cases versus the corresponding simulated values, leading to the conclusion that there are significant differences between field-measured delay times and the corresponding calculated delay times using the selected software. Nevertheless, the results showed that the SYNCHRO software was the best for predicting the field delay time at signalized intersections once the calibration process is complete. This study thus acts as a reference for simulation software selection in certain cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]