Abstract
In this paper we propose a new modeling tech-
nique for vehicular traffic flow, designed for capturing at a
macroscopic level some effects, due to the microscopic granularity of the flow of cars, which would be lost with a purely
continuous approach. The starting point is a multiscale method
for pedestrian modeling, recently introduced in [1], in which
measure-theoretic tools are used to manage the microscopic
and the macroscopic scales under a unique framework. In
the resulting coupled model the two scales coexist and share
information, in the sense that the same system is simultaneously
described from both a discrete (microscopic) and a continuous
(macroscopic) perspective. This way it is possible to perform
numerical simulations in which the single trajectories and the
average density of the moving agents affect each other. Such a
method is here revisited in order to deal with multi-population
traffic flow on networks. For illustrative purposes, we focus on
the simple case of the intersection of two roads. By exploiting
one of the main features of the multiscale method, namely its
dimension-independence, we treat one-dimensional roads and
two-dimensional junctions in a natural way, without referring to
classical network theory. Furthermore, thanks to the coupling
between the microscopic and the macroscopic scales, we model
the continuous flow of cars without losing the right amount
of granularity, which characterizes the real physical system
and triggers self-organization effects, such as, for example, the
oscillatory patterns visible at jammed uncontrolled crossroads.
Anno
2012
Autori IAC
Tipo pubblicazione
Altri Autori
E. Cristiani, B. Piccoli, A. Tosin