Common feature of concave growth pattern of oscillations in terms of speed, acceleration, fuel consumption and emission in car following: experiment and modeling

TL;DR

This study investigates the growth patterns of traffic oscillations in car-following behavior, revealing a common concave growth pattern in speed, acceleration, fuel consumption, and emissions through experiments and modeling.

Contribution

It uncovers a shared concave growth pattern in various traffic oscillation indices and introduces an improved driver model that replicates this behavior accurately.

Findings

Oscillations in speed, acceleration, emissions, and fuel consumption follow a concave growth pattern.

Fuel consumption and emissions decrease significantly with increased average speed.

The improved driver model with memory effect successfully reproduces the observed oscillation patterns.

Abstract

This paper has investigated the growth pattern of traffic oscillations by using vehicle trajectory data in a car following experiment. We measured the standard deviation of acceleration, emission and fuel consumption of each vehicle in the car-following platoon. We found that: (1) Similar to the standard deviation of speed, these indices exhibit a common feature of concave growth pattern along vehicles in the platoon; (2) The emission and fuel consumption of each vehicle decrease remarkably when the average speed of the platoon increases from low value; However, when reaches 30km/h, the change of emission and fuel consumption with is not so significant; (3), the correlations of emission and fuel consumption with both the standard deviation of acceleration and the speed oscillation are strong. Simulations show that with the memory effect of drivers taken into account, the improved two-dimensional intelligent driver model is able to reproduce the common feature of traffic oscillation evolution quite well.