Solitons and kinks in a general car-following model

Abstract

We study a general car-following model of traffic flow on an infinitely long single-lane road, which assumes that a car's acceleration depends on time-delayed values of its own speed, the headway between it and the car ahead, and the rate of change of headway, but makes minimal assumptions about the functional form of that dependence. We present a detailed characterization of the onset of linear instability; in particular we find a specific limit on the delay time below which the marginal wave number at the onset of instability is zero, and another specific limit on the delay time above which steady flow is always unstable. Crucially, the threshold of absolute stability generally does not coincide with an inflection point of the steady-state velocity function. When the marginal perturbation at onset has wave number 0, we show that Burgers and Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equations can be derived under the usual assumptions, and that corrections to the KdV equation "select" a single member of the one-parameter set of its one-soliton solutions by driving a slow evolution of the soliton parameter. While in previous models this selected soliton has always marked the threshold of a finite-amplitude instability of linearly stable steady flow, we find that it can alternatively be a stable, small-amplitude jam that occurs when steady flow is linearly unstable. The model reduces to the usual modified Korteweg-de Vries (mKdV) equation only in the special situation that the threshold of absolute stability coincides with an inflection point of the steady-state velocity function; in general, near the threshold of absolute stability the model reduces instead to a KdV equation in the regime of small solitons, while near an inflection point it reduces to a Hayakawa-Nakanishi equation. Like the mKdV equation, the Hayakawa-Nakanishi equation admits a continuous family of kink solutions, and the selection criterion arising from the corrections to this equation can be written down explicitly.