01660282

Component

Recent scholars have developed a number of stochastic car-following models that have successfully captured driver behavior uncertainties and reproduced stochastic traffic oscillation propagation. While elegant frequency domain analytical methods are available for stability analysis of classic deterministic linear car-following models, there lacks an analytical method for quantifying the stability performance of their peer stochastic models. To fill this methodological gap, this study proposes a novel analytical method that measures traffic oscillation magnitudes and reveals oscillation characteristics of stochastic linear car-following models. The authors investigate a general class of stochastic linear car-following models that contain a linear car-following model and a stochastic noise term. Based on frequency domain analysis tools (e.g., Z-transform) and stochastic process theories, the authors propose analytical formulations for quantifying the expected speed variances of a stream of vehicles following one another according to one such stochastic car-following model, where the lead vehicle is subject to certain random perturbations. Our analysis on the homogeneous case (where all vehicles are identical) reveals two significant phenomena consistent with recent observations of traffic oscillation growth patterns from field experimental data: A linear stochastic car-following model with common parameter settings yields (i) concave growth of the speed oscillation magnitudes and (ii) reduction of oscillation frequency as oscillation propagates upstream. Numerical studies verify the universal soundness of the proposed analytical approach for both homogeneous and heterogeneous traffic scenarios and draw insights into traffic oscillation properties of a number of commonly used car-following models.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB45 Standing Committee on Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics.

18-04406

English

0000-0002-5264-3775

6p

2018

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

References

Car following; Frequency domain analysis; Oscillation; Stochastic processes; Traffic flow; Traffic models

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-04406

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 8 2018 11:05AM