Formalizing the heterogeneity of the vehicle-driver system to reproduce traffic oscillations

Road traffic congestion is the result of various phenomena often of random nature and not directly observable with empirical experiments. This makes it difficult to clearly understand the empirically observed traffic instabilities. The vehicles’ acceleration/deceleration patterns are known to trigger instabilities in the traffic flow under congestion. It has been empirically observed that free-flow pockets or voids may arise when there is a difference in the speeds and the spacing between the follower and the leader increases. This paper proposes a novel car-following approach that takes as input the driver and the vehicle characteristics and explicitly reproduces the impact of the vehicle dynamics and the driver's behaviour by adopting the Microsimulation Free-flow aCceleration (MFC) model. By introducing naturalistic variation in the driving styles (timid and aggressive drivers) and the vehicle characteristics (specification from different vehicle models), the proposed model can reproduce realistic traffic flow oscillations, similar to those observed empirically. The results prove the robustness of the proposed model and the ability to describe traffic flow oscillations as a consequence of the combination of driving style and vehicle's technical specifications.

MAKRIDIS Michail;  LECLERCQ Ludovic;  CIUFFO Biagio;  FONTARAS Georgios;  MATTAS Konstantinos; 

2022-03-08

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

JRC121975

0968-090X (online),   

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X20307129?via%3Dihub,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC121975,   

10.1016/j.trc.2020.102803 (online),