Simulation of Temporary Traffic Bottleneck on Highways Based on Cellular Automaton

To study the influence of the forced lane changing and the distribution of conflict points on the temporary traffic bottleneck flow of freeways, a cellular automaton model was proposed considering the driver's changing psychology behavior. The new model combines the rule of forced lane changing with the NaSch (NS) model and the symmetric two-lane cellular automaton (STCA) model. Under open boundary, the relationship between the traffic flow at the bottleneck, the lane-changing frequency and the car arrival rate were obtained by simulation with different safe lane-changing probabilities, forced lane changing probabilities, distance between conflict areas, and length of conflict area. The results show that safe lane-changing behavior has little influence on the flow. The main factor decreasing the maximum flow is the forced lane changing behavior at the bottleneck. When the safe lane-changing probability is 0.5 and the forced lane changing probability changes from 0.0 to 0.1, the maximum flow decreases by 17%. The length of conflict area helps to reduce the traffic congestion at the bottleneck. When the range length of conflict area changes from 1 to 4 cells, the critical car arrival rate increases by 4%. The traffic conflict area has significant influence on the traffic safety risk, which could increase with the lane-changing probability.