Impact of the visibility effect on phase transitions in lattice hydrodynamic model under the bad weather traffic environment

In severe weather environments, the visibility will decrease, and it can affect the driver's visual field in the traffic system. Consequently, we build a new lattice hydrodynamic model for traffic flow to investigate the visibility effect. According to the density-sensitivity phase analysis, we find that the stable region keeps expanding when the visibility falls down. The kink-antkink soliton solution of the mKdV equation, which is associated with the visibility effect, is obtained from the nonlinear analysis. Finally, numerical simulations are performed for density evolution, flux evolution and hysteresis phenomenon. The results manifest that the traffic flow becomes more and more stable owing to the descending visibility. Unfortunately, the traffic flux goes down due to the low visibility.