Theoretical conditions for restricting secondary jams in jam-absorption driving scenarios

Abstract: There has been considerable interest in the active maneuvers made by a small number of vehicles to improve macroscopic traffic flows. Jam-absorption driving (JAD) is a single vehicle's maneuvers to remove a wide moving jam and consists of two actions. First, a vehicle upstream of the jam slows down and maintains a low velocity. Because it cuts off the supply of vehicles to the jam, the jam shrinks and finally disappears. Second, it returns to following the vehicle ahead of it. One of the critical problems of JAD is the occurrence of secondary jams. The perturbations caused by JAD actions may grow into secondary jams due to the instability of traffic flows. The occurrence of secondary jams was investigated by numerical simulations in non-periodic systems where only human-driven vehicles are placed upstream of the vehicle performing JAD. However, no theoretical condition has been proposed to restrict secondary jams in these systems. This paper presents a theoretical condition restricting secondary jams in a semi-infinite system composed of a vehicle performing JAD and the other human-driven vehicles obeying a car-following model on a non-periodic and single-lane road. In constructing this condition, we apply the linear string stability to a macroscopic spatiotemporal structure of JAD. Numerical simulations show that a finite version of this condition restricts secondary jams. Moreover, under this condition, we demonstrate that it is possible to restrict secondary jams in the semi-infinite system under wide ranges of the parameters of the system. Furthermore, we construct the conditions suppressing secondary jams in other semi-infinite systems with inflows from other lanes or a bottleneck, and demonstrate that JAD can restrict secondary jams in these systems. Thus, our method theoretically guarantees that a single vehicle can improve macroscopic traffic flows.