Eur. Phys. J. B 58, 197-206 (2007)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00215-3

Phase transition in a mixture of adaptive cruise control vehicles and manual vehicles

¹ School of Engineering Science, University of Science and technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China
² School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, 100044, P.R. China
³ Institute of Information Sciences and Technology, Massey University Private Bag 102-904, North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland, New Zealand

Corresponding author: ^a rjiang@ustc.edu.cn

Received: 9 February 2007
Revised: 25 June 2007
Published online: 10 August 2007

Abstract

In this paper, we have investigated the effects of adaptive cruise control (ACC) vehicles in a mixture with manually-controlled (manual) vehicles. The manual vehicles are simulated by using the modified comfortable driving model, which can describe synchronized traffic flow. The phase transition probabilities from free flow to synchronized flow and from synchronized flow to jams are studied. The impact of ACC vehicles on the flow rates in free flow and synchronized flow and on the propagation velocity of the downstream front of jams are investigated. The dependence of microscopic properties of traffic flow, including the spatiotemporal patterns and the velocity distribution, is explored. Our results are expected to be useful for developing ACC systems.