Conformity and stability analysis of a modified spring-mass-damper system dynamics-based car-following model

摘要

Modeling the dynamics of a traffic system involves using the principles of both physical and social sciences since it is composed of vehicles as well as drivers. A novel car-following model is proposed in this paper by incorporating the socio-psychological aspects of drivers into the dynamics of a purely physics-based spring-mass-damper mechanical system to represent the driver-vehicle longitudinal movements in a traffic stream. The crux of this model is that a traffic system can be viewed as various masses interacting with each other by means of springs and dampers attached between them. While the spring and damping constants represent the driver behavioral parameters, the mass component represents the vehicle characteristics. The proposed model when tested for its ability to capture the traffic system dynamics both at micro, driver, and macro, stream, levels behaved pragmatically. The stability analysis carried out using perturbation method also revealed that the proposed model is both locally and asymptotically stable.