A rigorous treatment of a follow-the-leader traffic model with traffic lights present

Journal Article · Wed Jul 16 04:00:00 EDT 2003

OSTI ID:821218

Argall, Brenna ^[1]; Cheleshkin, Eugene; Greenberg, J M; Hinde, Colin; Lin, Pei-Jen

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1. The Electrochemical Society

Traffic flow on a unidirectional roadway in the presence of traffic lights is modeled. Individual car responses to green, yellow, and red lights are postulated and these result in rules governing the acceleration and deceleration of individual cars. The essence of the model is that only specific cars are directly affected by the lights. The other cars behave according to simple follow-the-leader rules which limit their speed by the spacing between it and the car directly ahead. The model has a number of desirable properties; namely cars do not run red lights, cars do not smash into one another, and cars exhibit no velocity reversals. In a situation with multiple lights operating in-phase we get, after an initial startup period, a constant number of cars through each light during any green-yellow period. Moreover, this flux is less by one or two cars per period than the flux obtained in discretized versions of the idealized Lighthill, Whitham, Richards model which allows for infinite accelerations.

• Research Organization: The Electrochemical Society, Inc. (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: U.S. Department of Energy (US)
• DOE Contract Number: FG02-87CE34012
• OSTI ID: 821218
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION
AUTOMOBILES
LIGHTING SYSTEMS
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
TRAFFIC CONTROL