Multi-anticipation and heterogeneity in car-following empirics and a first exploration of their implications

This paper considers multi-anticipative car-following behavior, i.e. longitudinal driving behavior that includes driver responses to multiple vehicles ahead. The paper addresses the results of a trajectory data based empirical study with respect to multi-anticipation. The results of this part of the study provide empirical evidence of multi-anticipative car-following. A second important conclusion is that there is a large inter-driver variability in multi-leader driving behavior, both with respect to model parameters and the degree of multi-anticipation. These results lead to the question what the implications of these findings are for microscopic modeling? The paper therefore also addresses this important question by performing first explorations of the results with respect to both heterogeneity with respect to optimal parameters and the degree of multi-anticipation by performing simulations where the prime focus is on the speed of the propagation of a disturbance and platoon stability