A Macroscopic Traffic Model Based on Reaction Velocity

In this paper, a new macroscopic traffic model is presented which characterizes driver response during transitions. The commonly employed Payne-Whitham (PW) model characterizes this response using a constant regardless of the reaction time and interaction and distance between vehicles. As a consequence, the resulting traffic behavior can be unrealistic. In this paper, a model is proposed which considers the reaction time, transition distance, and velocity profile based on the traffic density. This produces smooth changes in density and velocity during transitions compared to the PW model. Results are presented for a bottleneck along a circular road which show that the proposed model provides more realistic behavior than the PW model.