Simulation of Highway Traffic Bottleneck Via Cellular Automata

To analyze the congestion caused by road bottlenecks on the highway, this paper uses the improved KernerKlenov-Wolf (KKW) model to establish car-following rules, and comprehensively considers the impacts of vehicle spacing and speed on vehicle lane-changing behaviors to establish free lane-changing and mandatory lane-changing rules. This paper also analyzes the distribution of the congestion area upstream of the road bottleneck, the characteristics of lane-changing behaviors, and the changes of traffic parameters on the lane through simulations under different traffic flow conditions. The results show that: with given traffic volume, the length of congested area in merging lane is in a dynamic equilibrium state and will not change with time. In addition, the convergence behavior upstream of the road bottleneck can lead to a severe speed drop on the target lane. The vehicle speed changes in the convergence lane and the target lane tend to be consistent. From the perspective of lane-changing cluster characteristics, the low-speed merging vehicles tend to change lanes in small groups in the upstream of the road bottleneck due to heavy traffic volumes, which would cause severe traffic shocks in the target lane. After the bottleneck disappears, the traffic recovery time increases linearly with the increase of the entering traffic flow. Copyright © 2022 by Science Press.