Improved 2D Intelligent Driver Model simulating synchronized flow and evolution concavity in traffic flow

Abstract: This paper firstly show that 2 Dimensional Intelligent Driver Model (Jiang et al., PloS one, 9(4), e94351, 2014) is not able to replicate the synchronized traffic flow. Then we propose an improved model by considering the difference between the driving behaviors at high speeds and that at low speeds. Simulations show that the improved model can reproduce the phase transition from synchronized flow to wide moving jams, the spatiotemporal patterns of traffic flow induced by traffic bottleneck, and the evolution concavity of traffic oscillations (i.e. the standard deviation of the velocities of vehicles increases in a concave/linear way along the platoon). Validating results show that the empirical time series of traffic speed obtained from Floating Car Data can be well simulated as well.