Evolvement laws and stability analyses of traffic network constituted by changing ramps and main road

Abstract

Proposing realistic hybrid traffic flow model is a promising and hot topic in the area of fluid mechanics and nonlinear dynamics, since they can take advantages of combining dynamical properties of each individual vehicle and macroscopic characteristics of the global system. In this paper, different from the previous work, we propose a hybrid traffic flow model considering the dynamical competition between ramps and main roads. Afterwards, the dynamical control equations of the proposed system are established. Then, by means of performing finite difference analyses, nonlinear dynamical characteristics and specific properties of the proposed system are investigated. Evolvement laws of characteristic order parameters of the proposed traffic flow system are obtained by analyzing the change of density, velocity and current in various circumstances. Moreover, matrices of partition coefficient are employed into the proposed traffic network composed of a main road and varied ramps. Additionally, linear and nonlinear stability analyses are considered in different phase spaces. Therefore, the robustness of the proposed system is tested by both linear and nonlinear dynamics. Our work will be helpful to understand mesoscopic dynamical behaviors of each individual vehicle and inner interactions between them.