Cellular Automata Model for Lane Changing Activity

In the present work, a microscopic traffic flow model using Cellular Automata is proposed. The model is intended to explain accurately the lane changing activity, which is treated as a continuous process rather than a discrete event as suggested by previous models. Various important properties of traffic flow could be explained by the proposed model and the simulated results are quite reasonable. The proposed model can give explanation to the microscopic properties, like, local stability, asymptotic stability, closing-in/shying-away and insensitivity of safe distance headway to perturbation pattern, initial distance headway and initial speed. Macroscopic properties like speed, flow and density were studied for a traffic stream under various conditions like varying road width. The results obtained from simulation of single lane and wide roads with lane discipline match closely to the values suggested by Highway Capacity Manual.