Traffic waves

Traffic waves

Nonlinear Wave and Solitons

Published in K.T. Chau, Applications of Differential Equations in Engineering and Mechanics, 2019

In Section 9.5, we will see that when dispersion interacts with nonlinearity, unexpected things can happen. In the next section, we will first consider a one-dimensional shock wave and its application to a traffic wave.

Freeway vehicle fuel efficiency improvement via cooperative adaptive cruise control

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Journal Information

Published in Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2021

Hao Liu, Steven E. Shladover, Xiao-Yun Lu, Xingan (David) Kan

Figure 5 displays the spatial patterns of the vehicle fuel consumption rate. For the CACC cases, the peak appears at the merging area. The fuel consumption peak becomes smaller than the peak of the base case once the CACC market penetration is 60% or higher. When the CACC market penetration is 40% or lower, the traffic congestion at the merging area is worse than the human driver case because the majority of CACC vehicles use ACC controllers. The traffic congestion further propagates upstream, resulting in degraded fuel efficiency in segments upstream of the merging area as well. In the ACC cases, there are two peaks for the fuel consumption rate. The first peak is at the merging area and the second one is a few hundred meters upstream of the merging area where mainline vehicles frequently make proactive lane changes to avoid the conflicts with the on-ramp traffic. Those lane change behaviors can intensify the traffic waves derived from the merging area, thereby causing a smaller peak of the fuel consumption.

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Nonlinear Wave and Solitons

Freeway vehicle fuel efficiency improvement via cooperative adaptive cruise control