Jam Propagation Analysis With Mesoscopic Traffic Simulation

Road traffic simulation is becoming more important as the complexity and multi-modality of traffic grow with the evolution of novel transportation and automotive technologies. There are several ways to mimic traffic dynamics. However, realistic modeling traffic has a clear trade-off between accuracy and simulation processing time. Obviously, the more detailed traffic dynamics are sought, the more calculation is needed. The paper offers a compromise solution introducing a novel mesoscopic traffic simulation framework applicable on an arbitrary network level. The mathematical background of the simulation is provided as the extension of the shockwave profile model (SPM), distinguishing three continuous traffic states on a link. Extension of the model is done by means of a weighted directed graph where the dynamic edge weights are the queue lengths on each link. The model can handle both signalized and unsignalized road links. An important opportunity of the proposed network SPM approach is the analysis of traffic jam propagation and bottleneck detection. The presented mesoscopic simulator is validated based on both synthetic and real-world traffic networks using fleet traffic data. The simulated queue length in the mesoscopic simulation accurately matches the microscopic traffic simulation results.