Towards a realistic description of traffic flow based on cellular automata

This paper presents a new single-lane cellular automaton model to simulate microscopic traffic flow. The model introduces a new set of simple rules to change the speed of vehicles that incorporates three important thresholds required by the follower vehicle to accelerate, slow down or maintain its speed. Thus, the space gap, relative speed and limited acceleration/deceleration capabilities are introduced into simulations. Simulation results obtained from a system with periodic conditions show that the model avoids unrealistic deceleration behavior found in most previous cellular automata models. Besides, the model is also capable to reproduce most empirical findings including the three states of traffic flow and the backward speed of the downstream front of the traffic jam. Moreover, the new model preserves the computational simplicity of the cellular automata models.