Distributions of Time- and Distance-Headways in the Nagel-Schreckenberg Model of Vehicular Traffic: Effects of Hindrances

TL;DR

This paper studies how static obstacles on a single-lane highway affect the distributions of time- and distance-headways in a vehicular traffic model, revealing impacts on traffic flow characteristics.

Contribution

It introduces analysis of the Nagel-Schreckenberg model considering static hindrances, highlighting their effects on headway distributions in steady-state traffic.

Findings

Hindrances alter the shape of headway distributions.

Static obstacles influence traffic flow stability.

Distributions show significant deviations from homogeneous conditions.

Abstract

In the Nagel-Schreckenberg model of vehicular traffic on single-lane highways vehicles are modelled as particles which hop forward from one site to another on a one dimensional lattice and the inter-particle interactions mimic the manner in which the real vehicles influence each other's motion. In this model the number of empty lattice sites in front of a particle is taken to be a measure of the corresponding distance-headway(DH). The time-headway(TH) is defined as the time interval between the departures (or arrivals) of two successive particles recorded by a detector placed at a fixed position on the model highway. We investigate the effects of spatial inhomogeneities of the highway (static hindrances) on the DH and TH distributions in the steady-state of this model.