Car-following model with relative-velocity effect and its experimental verification

Abstract

In driving a vehicle, drivers respond to the changes of both the headway and the relative velocity to the vehicle in front. In this paper a new car-following model including these maneuvers is proposed. The acceleration of the model becomes infinite (has a singularity) when the distance between two vehicles is zero, and the asymmetry between the acceleration and the deceleration is incorporated in a nonlinear way. The model is simple but contains enough features of driving for reproducing real vehicle traffic. From the linear stability analysis, we confirm that the model shows the metastable homogeneous flow around the critical density, beyond which a traffic jam emerges. Moreover, we perform experiments to verify this model. From the data it is shown that the acceleration of a vehicle has a positive correlation with the relative velocity. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.83.046105 4 More Received 16 February 2010Revised 10 January 2011Published 11 April 2011©2011 American Physical Society