Analysis and Validation of a Freeway Traffic Model Including Controlled Vehicles

This paper presents an analysis and validation of a control-oriented macroscopic moving bottleneck model with an agent-based traffic simulator. The moving bottleneck approach uses a partial differential equation (PDE) to model traffic flow and an ordinary differential equation (ODE) to model the behavior of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). On the other hand, the agent-based simulation uses AGAMAS, which is a framework integrated into SUMO using JADE, to define controlled agents in microscopic traffic flow. The coupled PDE-ODE model is extended from previous work to incorporate more realistic fundamental diagrams validated on real-world data taken from motorway A20 in the Netherlands. The two models are compared, and the moving bottleneck model is validated on several different scenarios including CAV-free operation, the presence of a stationary bottleneck (accident), and the presence of a moving bottleneck. Overall, the improved macroscopic moving bottleneck approach is shown to capture the average behavior of the agent-based approach, namely the location of the bottleneck, the density values upstream and downstream and of the bottleneck, and the speed of the backward propagation of the bottleneck. In addition, the macroscopic model is shown to be less computationally intensive which is paramount in light of real-time control applications.