Evaluation of Department of Defense Installation Entry Control Facilities Using Microsimulation

This paper develops a microsimulation-based methodology to analyze the design and operations of arterial roadway corridors, commonly known as entry control facilities (ECF), at Department of Defense (DOD) installations. These facilities serve as a means of ingress and egress to the installations and provide the first level of security. ECFs are relatively expensive to construct, averaging $12 million; therefore, it is imperative to design and operate them efficiently. Current practice is to use a simplified deterministic, macroscopic methodology when designing the physical layout (e.g., number of lanes, length of arterial, etc.) as well as the operations (e.g., single and tandem processing, etc.) of the ECF. This paper will develop a simulation-based methodology that is better adapted for capturing the intricacies of ECF design and operations. The paper proposes a general simulation-based methodology that affords ECF designers the opportunity to make realistic trade-offs between construction costs and operation costs (e.g., personnel, travel time, delay, etc.). A test case at Fort Gordon, Georgia using the VISSIM (TM) 2020 simulation software is used to illustrate the methodology. A variety of geometric and operational strategies were examined, and it was found that the six-lane configuration operating with tandem processing gave the best results. The improvements in delay and queue length were statistically significant compared with the other alternatives. In summary, the proposed methodology introduces a viable means to simulate real-world traffic conditions at ECFs. It is hypothesized that the methodology developed in this paper will be a valuable tool for the design and operation of ECFs.