Zuojun Wang

Traffic breakdown refers to the first-order transition from free flow to synchronized flow. It is characterized by a rapid decrease in speed, suddenly increasing density, and abruptly plummeting capacity in most of the relevant observations. To understand its cause and model its empirical observations, a multi-regime car-following model is proposed, which classifies the car-following state into four regimes, i.e., Free driving, High-speed following, Low-speed following, and Emergency. Simulation results demonstrate that traffic breakdown and spontaneous jam formation can be reproduced simultaneously by the new model. Experimental verification has shown that the new model can successfully simulate the observed concave growth pattern of traffic oscillations.