Fuel Consumption in Nagel - Schreckenberg Traffic Flow Model

This paper has studied fuel consumption in Nagel-Schreckenberg traffic flow model. The dependence of fuel consumption (per km per vehicle) on the average density ρ, the maximum velocity vmax, and the randomization probability p is studied. The relationship between fuel consumption and average velocity is also investigated. Our simulations indicate to minimize fuel consumption, different average velocities need to be maintained under different traffic flow situations. INTRODUCTION Recently, traffic congestion has become more and more serious in large cities, especially in developing countries, such as in Beijing and Shanghai in China (Helbing, 2001; Chowdhury et al, 2000). It has been empirically observed that complex dynamic phenomena such as stop-and-go traffic, phantom jams, and capacity drop will appear in congested traffic. Obviously, this increases fuel consumption and vehicle emission. Nevertheless, little progress has been made to understand the effects of traffic dynamics on fuel consumption (Ericsson et al, 2006; Greenwood et al, 2007). To model the traffic dynamics, different kinds of traffic flow models are presented, including the car-following models, the cellular automaton (CA) models, the fluid dynamic models and the gas-kinetic-based models. Compared with other models, the CA models’ evolution rules are simple, straightforward to understand, computationally efficient and sufficient to emulate much of the behavior of observed traffic flow, therefore, using CA has become a well-established method to model, analyze, understand, and even forecast the behavior of real road traffic. The Nagel-Schreckenberg model was presented in 1992 and it is a minimal CA model in the sense that any simplification will lead to unrealistic traffic behaviors (Nagel and Schreckenberg, 1992). In the model, such phenomena as spontaneous appearance of jams and stop-and-go traffic could be reproduced. Since the birth of Nagel-Schreckenberg model, there have been an overwhelming number of proposals and publications in this field. The aim of this paper is to investigate fuel consumption in Nagel-Schreckenberg model. The dependence of fuel consumption (per km per vehicle) on the average density ρ, the maximum velocity vmax, and the randomization probability p is studied. The relationship between fuel consumption and average velocity is also investigated. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, the Nagel-Schreckenberg model is reviewed and the basic simulation results are introduced. In section3, the fuel consumption model