Performance analysis to evaluate overtaking behavior on highways

Abstract

Today, cities are facing new issues with the increase of the population and the massive urbanization. One of them is the mobility as the cities were not designed to support such increase. Improving mobility in smart cities, becomes an important challenge to avoid traffic jam and improving sustainability by reducing greenhouse effect. This contributes as well to having better life for citizen. Even with rich infrastructures, the vehicles behavior could decrease the traffic flow. This is why figure out how the mobility is done on the highways can give more details on how it can create traffic jams and then several solutions could be proposed to contribute to the improvements. This is the goal of this study. In this paper, a new stochastic model based on Markov chain is proposed, which represents the behaviors of overtaking on the highways. A full description of the model is given with numerical resolution to calculate several rewards such as delays and congestion. Intensive simulations were carried out to compare both simulations and analytical model results and to provide results for more complex configurations.