Second order macroscopic traffic flow model validation using automatic differentiation with resilient backpropagation and particle swarm optimisation algorithms

•METANET model validation with automatic assignment of fundamental diagrams.•PSO applied with explicit constraint on number of fundamental diagrams used.•Coupling of METANET, ADOL-C and RPROP for gradient based optimisation.•Calculation of sensitivities and their spatio-temporal propagation in a network.