A realistic two-lane traffic model for highway traffic

TL;DR

This paper extends a cellular automaton traffic model to two lanes, successfully reproducing lane usage inversion and lane synchronization phenomena observed in real highway traffic without parameter fine-tuning.

Contribution

The study introduces a two-lane extension of an existing traffic model that maintains its empirical accuracy and reproduces key two-lane traffic phenomena.

Findings

Reproduces lane usage inversion

Models density-dependent lane changes

Aligns with empirical lane synchronization data

Abstract

A two-lane extension of a recently proposed cellular automaton model for traffic flow is discussed. The analysis focuses on the reproduction of the lane usage inversion and the density dependence of the number of lane changes. It is shown that the single-lane dynamics can be extended to the two-lane case without changing the basic properties of the model which are known to be in good agreement with empirical single-vehicle data. Therefore it is possible to reproduce various empirically observed two-lane phenomena, like the synchronization of the lanes, without fine-tuning of the model parameters.