Modeling and Simulation of Multi-Lane Traffic Flow

TL;DR

This paper develops a macroscopic multi-lane traffic flow model based on gas-kinetic principles, capturing complex behaviors like lane-changing and overtaking, and simplifies it for efficient bottleneck simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a new gas-kinetic derived multi-lane traffic model with corrections and a reduced form for practical bottleneck simulation.

Findings

Model accurately describes lane-changing and overtaking behaviors.

Reduced model enables efficient simulation of bottleneck scenarios.

Provides a systematic derivation from gas-kinetic principles.

Abstract

A most important aspect in the field of traffic modeling is the simulation of bottleneck situations. For their realistic description a macroscopic multi-lane model for uni-directional freeways including acceleration, deceleration, velocity fluctuations, overtaking and lane-changing maneuvers is systematically deduced from a gas-kinetic (Boltzmann-like) approach. The resulting equations contain corrections with respect to previous models. For efficient computer simulations, a reduced model delineating the coarse-grained temporal behavior is derived and applied to bottleneck situations.