Macroscopic Modelling and Simulation of Multi-lane Traffic

Abstract

In this work a macroscopic lane-changing model is incorporated to a single-class second-order gas-kinetic (GKT) traffic flow model to simulate multi-lane traffic flow dynamics. The lane-changing terms, simulating lane-changes due to vehicle interactions as well as spontaneous ones, are introduced as source and sink terms into the traffic flow equations. The numerical integration is based on an accurate and robust high-resolution finite volume relaxation scheme, where the nonlinear system of the macroscopic partial differential equations are first recast to a diagonilizable semi-linear system. A fifth order in space WENO scheme is used for spatial discretization, while time integration is based on a high-order implicit-explicit Runge-Kutta method. Numerical simulations, considering a two-lane highway flow where a bottleneck is formed due to a lane closure, demonstrate the ability of the proposed methodology to efficiently simulate the corresponding traffic dynamics.