No Arabic abstract
This paper has investigated the growth pattern of traffic oscillations by using vehicle trajectory data in a car following experiment. We measured the standard deviation of acceleration, emission and fuel consumption of each vehicle in the car-following platoon. We found that: (1) Similar to the standard deviation of speed, these indices exhibit a common feature of concave growth pattern along vehicles in the platoon; (2) The emission and fuel consumption of each vehicle decrease remarkably when the average speed of the platoon increases from low value; However, when reaches 30km/h, the change of emission and fuel consumption with is not so significant; (3), the correlations of emission and fuel consumption with both the standard deviation of acceleration and the speed oscillation are strong. Simulations show that with the memory effect of drivers taken into account, the improved two-dimensional intelligent driver model is able to reproduce the common feature of traffic oscillation evolution quite well.
Traffic breakdown, as one of the most puzzling traffic flow phenomena, is characterized by sharply decreasing speed, abruptly increasing density and in particular suddenly plummeting capacity. In order to clarify its root mechanisms and model its observed properties, this paper proposes a car-following model based on the following assumptions: (i) There exists a preferred time-varied and speed-dependent space gap that cars hope to maintain; (ii) there exists a region R restricted by two critical space gaps and two critical speeds in the car following region on the speed-space gap diagram, in which cars movements are determined by the weighted mean of the space- gap-determined acceleration and the speed-difference-determined acceleration; and (iii) out of region R, cars either accelerate to the free flow speed or decelerate to keep safety. Simulation results show that this model is able to simultaneously reproduce traffic breakdown and the transition from the synchronized traffic flow to wide moving jams. To our knowledge, this is the first car-following model that is able to fully depict traffic breakdown, spontaneous formation of jams, and the concave growth of the oscillations.
Understanding the mechanisms responsible for the emergence and evolution of oscillations in traffic flow has been subject to intensive research by the traffic flow theory community. In our previous work, we proposed a new mechanism to explain the generation of traffic oscillations: traffic instability caused by the competition between speed adaptation and the cumulative effect of stochastic factors. In this paper, by conducting a closer examination of car following data obtained in a 25-car platoon experiment, we discovered that the speed difference plays a more important role on car-following dynamics than the spacing, and when its amplitude is small, the growth of oscillations is mainly determined by the stochastic factors that follow the mean reversion process; when its amplitude increases, the growth of the oscillations is determined by the competition between the stochastic factors and the speed difference. An explanation is then provided, based on the above findings, to why the speed variance in the oscillatory traffic grows in a concave way along the platoon. Finally, we proposed a mode-switching stochastic car-following model that incorporates the speed adaptation and spacing indifference behaviors of drivers, which captures the observed characteristics of oscillation and discharge rate. Sensitivity analysis shows that reaction delay only has slight effect but indifference region boundary has significant on oscillation growth rate and discharge rate.
A rather simple car driving simulator was created based on the available open source engine TORCS and used to analyze the basic features of human behavior in car driving within the car-following setups. Eight subjects with different skill in driving real cars participated in these experiments. They were instructed to drive a virtual car without overtaking the lead car driven by computer at a fixed speed and not to lose sight of it. Moreover, these experiments were conducted with four different speed including 60km/h, 80km/h, 100km/h, and 120km/h. Based on the collected data the distribution of the headway, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are constructed and compared with available experimental data collected previously by the analysis of the real traffic flow. A new model for car-following is proposed capture the found properties. As the main results we draw a conclusion that the human behavior in car driving should be categorized as a generalized intermittent control with noise-driven activation of the active phase. Besides, we hypothesize that the extended phase space required for modeling human actions in car driving has to comprise four phase variables, namely, the headway distance, the velocity of car, its acceleration, and the car jerk, i.e., the time derivative of the car acceleration. This time, the time pattern of pedal pushing and the distribution of time derivative of pedal was utilized in addition to previous variables. Moreover, all subjects driving data were categorized as some styles with their shapes.
As a typical self-driven many-particle system far from equilibrium, traffic flow exhibits diverse fascinating non-equilibrium phenomena, most of which are closely related to traffic flow stability and specifically the growth/dissipation pattern of disturbances. However, the traffic theories have been controversial due to a lack of precise traffic data. We have studied traffic flow from a new perspective by carrying out large-scale car-following experiment on an open road section, which overcomes the intrinsic deficiency of empirical observations. The experiment has shown clearly the nature of car-following, which runs against the traditional traffic flow theory. Simulations show that by removing the fundamental notion in the traditional car-following models and allowing the traffic state to span a two-dimensional region in velocity-spacing plane, the growth pattern of disturbances has changed qualitatively and becomes qualitatively or even quantitatively in consistent with that observed in the experiment.
This paper has incorporated the stochasticity into the Newell car following model. Three stochastic driving factors have been considered: (i) Drivers acceleration is bounded. (ii) Drivers deceleration includes stochastic component, which is depicted by a deceleration with the randomization probability that is assumed to increase with the speed. (iii) Vehicles in the jam state have a larger randomization probability. Two simulation scenarios are conducted to test the model. In the first scenario, traffic flow on a circular road is investigated. In the second scenario, empirical traffic flow patterns in the NGSIM data induced by a rubberneck bottleneck is studied, and the simulated traffic oscillations and synchronized traffic flow are consistent with the empirical patterns. Moreover, two experiments of model calibration and validation are conducted. The first is to calibrate and validate using experimental data, which illustrates that the concave growth pattern has been quantitatively simulated. The second is to calibrate and cross validate vehicles trajectories using NGSIM data, which exhibits that the car following behaviors of single vehicles can be well described. Therefore, our study highlights the importance of speed dependent stochasticity in traffic flow modeling, which cannot be ignored as in most car-following studies.