A Multi-Gears Cellular Automata Model for Traffic Flow Based on Kinetics Theory

Traffic flow modeling based on cellular automata (CA) has gained considerable importance as one effective tool to successfully simulate complex traffic systems and understand their behavior. However, most of the existing CA models assumes a constant acceleration rate for the vehicles, which is an oversimplification and should be avoided. In fact, most conventional vehicles have multiple gears transmissions. Thus, when one vehicle reaches its top gear, its acceleration is only a fraction of that available at lower speeds. In this paper, a simple and reliable CA model oriented to faithfully reproduce the acceleration profile of vehicles is proposed. For this purpose, a multi- regime constant acceleration model is introduced. In this way, the proposed model can have many points of discontinuity when a vehicle is accelerating based on the vehicle velocity and multiple gears. Simulation results indicate that the performance of vehicles accelerating from a stopped position is reproduced more in line with that obtained from real vehicles, when a larger number of gears is considered. Moreover, the resulting model is more in line with acceleration profile of the vehicles in the real world without seriously jeopardizing its computational efficiency.