Achievement of Alternative Configurations of Vehicles on Multiple Lanes

TL;DR

This paper explores a novel vehicle configuration on multi-lane roads that avoids lane changes, utilizing cellular automaton models to analyze its effectiveness in reducing congestion through the zipper effect.

Contribution

It introduces a cellular automaton model for alternative vehicle configurations and develops a theoretical method to quantify their occurrence, validated by simulations.

Findings

The alternative configuration improves smooth merging at intersections.

Theoretical calculations match simulation results closely.

The model demonstrates potential for congestion reduction strategies.

Abstract

Heavy traffic congestion daily occurs at merging sections on highway. For releasing this congestion, possibility of alternative configuration of vehicles on multiple-lane road is discussed in this paper. This is the configuration where no vehicles move aside on the other lane. It has a merit in making smooth merging at an intersection or a junction due to so-called the "zipper effect". We show, by developing a cellular automaton model for multiple lanes, that this configuration is achieved by simple local interactions between vehicles neighboring each other. The degree of the alternative configuration in terms of the spatial increase of parallel driving length is studied by using both numerical simulations and mean field theory. We successfully construct a theoretical method for calculating this degree of the alternative configuration by using cluster approximation. It is shown that the theoretical results coincide with those of the simulations very well.