Cellular automaton model simulating spatiotemporal patterns, phase transitions and evolution concavity in traffic flow

Abstract

This paper firstly show that a recent model (Tian et al., Transpn. Res. B 71, 138-157, 2015) is not able to well replicate the evolution concavity in traffic flow, i.e. the standard deviation of vehicles increases in a concave/linear way along the platoon. Then we propose an improved model by introducing the safe speed, the logistic function of the randomization probability, and small randomization deceleration for low-speed vehicles into the model. Simulations show that the improved model can well reproduce the metastable states, the spatiotemporal patterns, the phase transition behaviors of traffic flow, and the evolution concavity of traffic oscillations. Validating results show that the empirical time series of traffic speed obtained from Floating Car Data can be well simulated as well.