title: Theory and Simulation for Traffic Characteristics on the Highway with a Slowdown Section.
abstract: We study the traffic characteristics on a single-lane highway with a slowdown section using the deterministic cellular automaton (CA) model. Based on the theoretical analysis, the relationships among local mean densities, velocities, traffic fluxes, and global densities are derived. The results show that two critical densities exist in the evolutionary process of traffic state, and they are significant demarcation points for traffic phase transition. Furthermore, the changing laws of the two critical densities with different length of limit section are also investigated. It is shown that only one critical density appears if a highway is not slowdown section; nevertheless, with the growing length of slowdown section, one critical density separates into two critical densities; if the entire highway is slowdown section, they finally merge into one. The contrastive analysis proves that the analytical results are consistent with the numerical ones.
authors.affiliation: MOE Key Laboratory for Urban Transportation Complex Systems Theory and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China.
authors.forename: Dejie
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: MOE Key Laboratory for Urban Transportation Complex Systems Theory and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China ; Integrated Transport Research Center of China, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China.
authors.forename: Baohua
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mao
authors.affiliation: MOE Key Laboratory for Urban Transportation Complex Systems Theory and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China.
authors.forename: Yaping
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Rong
authors.affiliation: MOE Key Laboratory for Urban Transportation Complex Systems Theory and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wei
mesh_terms: D001334:Automobile Driving; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004779:Environment Design; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D014186:Transportation