Use of an Improved Car-Following Model to Explain the Influence of Traffic Composition on Saturation Headway at Signalized Intersections

Abstract

Previous studies mainly used statistical methods to analyze the impact of traffic composition on saturation flow rate from the mesolevel, and there is insufficient research on how traffic composition affects driving behavior. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to establish a more accurate car-following model, establish the relationship between microbehavior and mesostatistical regularity, and explain the influence of vehicle composition on saturation headway. In this paper, an improved full velocity difference (FVD) model is proposed, which abstracts the driver characteristics of a heterogeneous flow into four scenarios: car-car, car-bus, bus-car, and bus-bus. The measured data are used to calibrate and verify the basic FVD and the improved FVD models. The performance of the improved model is significantly improved. The RMSE and RMSPE are reduced by 15.29% and 22.32%, respectively. Finally, through numerical simulation experiments, the variation of saturation headway with different proportions of buses is analyzed. The saturation headway increases with the increase of the proportion of heavy vehicles. Moreover, another important finding is that the saturation headway is not significantly influenced by the position of the buses but only by the proportion of the buses. The research results could provide theoretical support for the control and management of fleets composed of different vehicles at intersections.