Theoretical investigation, simulation and empirical analysis of the growth pattern of traffic oscillations in the Euler coordinates

Research output: Preprint/documentation/report › Preprint

Contributors

  • Junfang Tian - , Tianjin University (Author)
  • Martin Treiber - , Chair of Econometrics and Statistics, esp. in the Transport Sector (Author)
  • Rui Jiang - , Beijing Jiaotong University (Author)
  • Xiaopeng Li - , University of South Florida (Author)
  • Bin Jia - , Beijing Jiaotong University (Author)
  • Ziyou Gao - , Beijing Jiaotong University (Author)

Abstract

The formation and development of oscillations is an important traffic flow phenomenon. Recent studies found that along a vehicle platoon described in the Lagrangian specification, traffic oscillations grow in a concave way. Since stationary bottlenecks are more intuitively described in the Eulerian framework, this paper investigates whether the concave growth pattern of traffic oscillations in the Lagrangian coordinates can be transferred to the Euler coordinates (i.e. the concave increase in standard deviation is no longer measured across the vehicle indices but as a function of the road location). To this end, we theoretically unify these two ways of measuring oscillations by revealing their mapping relationship. We show that the growth pattern measured in the Lagrangian coordinates can be transferred to the Euler coordinates. We believe this finding is nontrivial since the scenarios are significantly different: while in vehicle platoons (Lagrangian view, non-penetrable moving bottleneck), the speed variance for a given vehicle is ideally constant, the drivers in the Eulerian setting (penetrable stationary bottleneck triggering the waves) experience all amplitudes, first the big ones and then the small ones. To test this proposition, we performed simulation using two different kinds of car-following models. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis. Finally, we performed empirical analysis using the NGSIM data, which also validates the theoretical analysis.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 12 Jun 2018
No renderer: customAssociatesEventsRenderPortal,dk.atira.pure.api.shared.model.researchoutput.WorkingPaper

External IDs

ArXiv http://arxiv.org/abs/1806.04287v2

Keywords

Keywords

  • nlin.PS, nlin.CG