Traffic flow models with two kinds of vehicles in terms of the vector-valued cellular automata and their fuzzification

Abstract

Elementary cellular automata (ECA) rule 184 can be used as mathematical models of traffic flows. The slow-to-start model is obtained from the ECA rule 184 model by taking time lag for restart into consideration and is represented by 3-state 3-neighbor cellular automata (CA). In the present paper, we propose a traffic model where vehicles following the slow-to-start rule and those not following the slow-to-start rule are mixed. This model, called the mixed slow-to-start model, is represented by 4-state 3-neighbor CA. Further, we introduce the vector representation of CA with the slow-to-start rule and with the mixed slow-to-start rule, and then get their corresponding fuzzy CA. These fuzzy CA provide continuous-valued traffic models with the slow-to-start effect. Comparing the fundamental diagrams of the the slow-to-start model, the mixed slow-to-start model, and their fuzzy counterparts, we investigate the influence of the density and the mixing ratio of vehicles on traffic jams.