Achievement of Alternative Configurations of Vehicles on Multiple Lanes

摘要

Heavy traffic congestion daily occurs at merging sections on highway. Forreleasing this congestion, possibility of alternative configuration of vehicleson multiple-lane road is discussed in this paper. This is the configurationwhere no vehicles move aside on the other lane. It has a merit in making smoothmerging at an intersection or a junction due to so-called the "zipper effect".We show, by developing a cellular automaton model for multiple lanes, that thisconfiguration is achieved by simple local interactions between vehiclesneighboring each other. The degree of the alternative configuration in terms ofthe spatial increase of parallel driving length is studied by using bothnumerical simulations and mean field theory. We successfully construct atheoretical method for calculating this degree of the alternative configurationby using cluster approximation. It is shown that the theoretical resultscoincide with those of the simulations very well.