The effects of overtaking strategy in the Nagel-Schreckenberg model

TL;DR

This paper introduces the NSOS model, an extension of the Nagel-Schreckenberg traffic model, incorporating overtaking strategies to analyze their impact on traffic flow and phase transitions.

Contribution

The study proposes the NSOS model with overtaking, revealing its effects on traffic flow and phase transition behavior compared to the original NS model.

Findings

Overtaking increases traffic flow at high densities.

Traffic jams still occur despite overtaking strategies.

The transition density is influenced mainly by braking probability p.

Abstract

Based on the Nagel-Schreckenberg (NS) model with periodic boundary conditions, we proposed the NSOS model by adding the overtaking strategy (OS). In our model, overtaking vehicles are randomly selected with probability $q$ at each time step, and the successful overtaking is determined by their velocities. We observed that (i) traffic jams still occur in the NSOS model; (ii) OS increases the traffic flow in the regime where the densities exceed the maximum flow density. We also studied the phase transition (from free flow phase to jammed phase) of the NSOS model by analyzing the overtaking success rate, order parameter, relaxation time and correlation function, respectively. It was shown that the NSOS model differs from the NS model mainly in the jammed regime, and the influence of OS on the transition density is dominated by the braking probability $p$