Social Force based Vehicle Model for Two-Dimensional Spaces

There is a growing interest in modeling heterogeneous traffic. This is especially true in Asian countries where a wide variety of transport modes operate on streets under differing traffic rules. There is also growing interest by urban planners and traffic engineers in applying the shared space or living street concepts to roadways. These approaches remove the traditional segregation of different road users by replacing lane markings and curbs with open spaces for use by all road users. There is some debate including safety and capacity issues when integrating pedestrian, bicyclists and car movement on an open space with little guidance. Current microscopic traffic flow models are not suitable when pedestrians, bicycles, cars and heavy vehicles share the same space since these modes have very different levels of maneuverability and speeds. Most current microscopic traffic flow models are 1- dimensional; they are based on car-following modes with limited consideration of lateral interaction. In contrast, social force models, frequently used to model pedestrian behavior, consider 2-dimensional motion and are not link-based. These models use an interacting force between pedestrians and obstacles to model walking and are often applied for crowd modeling. This paper presents an approach for extending the social force model to models also for vehicles movements. In contrast to traditional car-following models, the proposed approach uses a mechanically-based model to obtain reasonable turning trajectories and a proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller is integrated to control the simulated vehicles. The method was tested using data collected by video imaging at a T-intersection that was recently converted to a shared space area. Results of this case study show that the trajectories simulated using the proposed model are good approximations of the real trajectories.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB45 Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Fellendorf, Martin
  • Schönauer, Robert
  • Huang, Weinan
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2012-1-22 to 2012-1-26
• Date: 2012

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: TRB 91st Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Microscopic traffic flow; PID controllers; Simulation; Vehicle trajectories
• Uncontrolled Terms: Heterogeneous traffic; Mechanical models
• Geographic Terms: Asia
• Subject Areas: Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors; Vehicles and Equipment; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01371068
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 12-1347
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: May 25 2012 9:31AM