Theory and Simulation for Traffic Characteristics on the Highway with a Slowdown Section

Abstract

We study the traffic characteristics on a single-lane highway with a slowdown section using the deterministic cellular automaton (CA) model. Based on the theoretical analysis, the relationships among local mean densities, velocities, traffic fluxes, and global densities are derived. The results show that two critical densities exist in the evolutionary process of traffic state, and they are significant demarcation points for traffic phase transition. Furthermore, the changing laws of the two critical densities with different length of limit section are also investigated. It is shown that only one critical density appears if a highway is not slowdown section; nevertheless, with the growing length of slowdown section, one critical density separates into two critical densities; if the entire highway is slowdown section, they finally merge into one. The contrastive analysis proves that the analytical results are consistent with the numerical ones.

Improving traffic flow at a 2-to-1 lane reduction with wirelessly connected, adaptive cruise control vehicles

“…One lane ends at 𝑥 𝐵 while the other continues. Prior to the bottleneck is a section of each lane denoted as the "slowdown region" [22]. In these sections, the WCV are instructed to decelerate if preceding vehicles detect congestion building up and communicate this information to others.…”