Robert Barlovic | PubMed Health

PubMed2004

Mechanical restriction versus human overreaction triggering congested traffic states.

A new cellular automaton traffic model is presented. The focus is on mechanical restrictions of vehicles realized by limited acceleration and deceleration capabilities. These features are incorporated into the model in order to construct the condition of collision-free movement. The strict collision-free criterion imposed by the mechanical restrictions is softened in certain traffic situations, reflecting human overreaction. It is shown that the present model reliably reproduces most empirical findings including synchronized flow, the so-called pinch effect, and the time-headway distribution of free flow. The findings suggest that many free flow phenomena can be attributed to the platoon formation of vehicles (platoon effect).

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PubMed2002

Open boundaries in a cellular automaton model for traffic flow with metastable states.

The effects of open boundaries in the velocity-dependent randomization (VDR) model, a modified version of the well-known Nagel-Schreckenberg (NaSch) cellular automaton model for traffic flow, are investigated. In contrast to the NaSch model, the VDR model exhibits metastable states and phase separation in a certain density regime. A proper insertion strategy allows us to investigate the whole spectrum of possible system states and the structure of the phase diagram by Monte Carlo simulations. We observe an interesting microscopic structure of the jammed phases, which is different from the one of the NaSch model. For finite systems, the existence of high flow states in a certain parameter regime leads to a special structure of the fundamental diagram measured in the open system. Apart from that, the results are in agreement with an extremal principle for the flow, which has been introduced for models with a unique flow-density relation. Finally, we discuss the application of our findings for a systematic flow optimization. Here some surprising results are obtained, e.g., a restriction of the inflow can lead to an improvement of the total flow through a bottleneck.

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