title: Understanding widely scattered traffic flows, the capacity drop, and platoons as effects of variance-driven time gaps.
abstract: We investigate the adaptation of the time headways in car-following models as a function of the local velocity variance, which is a measure of the inhomogeneity of traffic flow. We apply this mechanism to several car-following models and simulate traffic breakdowns in open systems with an on-ramp as bottleneck and in a closed ring road. Single-vehicle data and one-minute aggregated data generated by several virtual detectors show a semiquantitative agreement with microscopic and flow-density data from the Dutch freeway A9. This includes the observed distributions of the net time headways for free and congested traffic, the velocity variance as a function of density, and the fundamental diagram. The modal value of the time headway distribution is shifted by a factor of about 2 under congested conditions. Macroscopically, this corresponds to the capacity drop at the transition from free to congested traffic. The simulated fundamental diagram shows free, synchronized, and jammed traffic, and a wide scattering in the congested traffic regime. We explain this by a self-organized variance-driven process that leads to the spontaneous formation and decay of long-lived platoons even for a deterministic dynamics on a single lane.
authors.affiliation: Dresden University of Technology, Andreas-Schubert-Strasse 23, 01062 Dresden, Germany. martin@mtreiber.de
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Treiber
authors.forename: Arne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kesting
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Helbing