Citation

Nishi R, Miki H, Tomoeda A, Nishinari K. Phys. Rev. E Stat. Nonlin. Soft Matter Phys. 2009; 79(6 Pt 2): 066119.

Affiliation

Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Tokyo, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, American Physical Society, Publisher American Institute of Physics)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

19658576

Abstract

Heavy traffic congestion occurs daily at merging sections on a highway. For relieving this congestion, possibility of alternative configuration of vehicles on multiple-lane road at a merging area is discussed in this paper. This is the configuration where no vehicles move aside on the other lane. It has merit in making a smooth merging at an intersection or a junction due to the so-called "zipper effect." We show, by developing a cellular automaton model for multiple lanes, that this configuration is achieved by simple local interactions between vehicles neighboring each other. The degree of the alternative configuration in terms of the spatial increase in parallel driving length is studied by using both numerical simulations and mean-field theory. We successfully construct a theoretical method for calculating this degree of the alternative configuration by using cluster approximation. It is shown that the theoretical results coincide with those of the simulations very well.

Language: en