clusters in macroscopic traffic flow models集群在宏观交通流模型.pdfVIP

World Journal of Mechanics, 2012, 2, 51-60 doi:10.4236/wjm.2012.21007 Published Online February 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/wjm) Clusters in Macroscopic Traffic Flow Models Rosa María Velasco, Patricia Saavedra Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, México Email: rmvb@xanum.uam.mx Received December 5, 2011; revised January 5, 2012; accepted January 15, 2012 ABSTRACT This paper concerns the traveling wave formation in macroscopic traffic flow models. The dynamics involved in this problem is described following a close analogy to compressible fluid dynamics. It is well known that vehicle clusters appear along a highway when the homogenous steady state taken as a reference is linearly unstable. The cluster proper- ties are determined in an approximate way in terms of the parameters proper to each model and are compared between them. Keywords: Traffic Flow; Solitons 1. Introduction cases we can choose some additional variables such as the speed variance [13,15,17], both in the phenomenol- The study of density waves in traffic flow has constituted ogical or in the kinetic approach. Besides their origin, it a subject of interest mainly in relation to the cluster for- is interesting to study the behavior predicted by the dy- mation. Clusters appear in real traffic only under certain namics proposed by them. In particular, we are interested conditions, then it