On the fundamental diagram of traffic flow

Florian Siebel; Wolfram Mauser

On the fundamental diagram of traffic flow

Statistical Mechanics 2007-05-23 v1 Physics and Society

Authors: Florian Siebel , Wolfram Mauser

Abstract

We present a new fluid-dynamical model of traffic flow. This model generalizes the model of Aw and Rascle [SIAM J. Appl. Math. 60 916-938] and Greenberg [SIAM J. Appl. Math 62 729-745] by prescribing a more general source term to the velocity equation. This source term can be physically motivated by experimental data, when taking into account relaxation and reaction time. In particular, the new model has a (linearly) unstable regime as observed in traffic dynamics. We develop a numerical code, which solves the corresponding system of balance laws. Applying our code to a wide variety of initial data, we find the observed inverse- $\lambda$ shape of the fundamental diagram of traffic flow.

Keywords

traffic flow model fundamental diagram Aw-Rascle model balance laws inverse-lambda shape

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0503290,
  title  = {On the fundamental diagram of traffic flow},
  author = {Florian Siebel and Wolfram Mauser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0503290},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

7 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. E

On the fundamental diagram of traffic flow

Abstract

Keywords

Cite

Comments

Related papers