Modeling multi-lane traffic flow under different overtaking rules based on cellular automaton

We intend to evaluate and analyze the performance of a rule “keep right except to pass”. Based on the cellular automaton (CA) model, we quantified the speed, safety gaps, road density (occupied rate) of the vehicles and simulated the overtaking process with MATLAB. We find out that the keep-right-except-to-pass overtaking rule cannot increase the traffic flow effectively, but it can increase the safety of the road to some extent. Then we propose a new role “slow traffic keep right” to improve the performance of the original overtaking rule.