Expansion of the Fundamental Diagram from a Microscopic Multilane Modeling Framework of Mixed Traffic

Abstract

Microscopic modeling of mixed traffic (i.e., automaton-driven vehicles and human-driven vehicles) dynamics, particularly car-following, lane-changing, and gap-acceptance, provides the opportunity to gain a more accurate estimation of flow-density relationships for both traditional traffic with human-driven vehicles and different mixed traffic scenarios. Our paper proposes a microscopic framework to model multilane traffic for both vehicle types on shared roadways which sets the stage to explore the capability of macroscopic car-following models in general to explain the fundamental flow-density relationship. Since prior models inadequately represent the fundamental diagram realistically, we propose a rectified macroscopic flow model that can account for the impact of both lane-changing and gap-acceptance. Differentiability, boundary conditions, and flexibility of the proposed model are tested to validate its applicability. Finally, the capability to interpret the flow-density relationship by the proposed model is verified for different mixed traffic scenarios. Although few model parameter values were obtained directly from the simulation input, the rest of the parameters have been calibrated by flow and density outputs from the simulations. The analysis results show a distinct correlation between the proposed model parameters with automation-driven vehicle shares and lane-changing rates of traffic. The findings from this study emphasize the importance of taking complete motion dynamics into account, rather than partial motion dynamics (i.e., car-following) as has been the case in the previous studies, to explain macroscopic traffic flow characteristics, irrespective of the vehicle type.