Impact of leading speed pattern on oscillation evolution in stochastic linear car-following models

Understanding the spatiotemporal evolution mechanism of traffic oscillation is of great significance in the traffic flow studies. Recently, a frequency-domain stability analysis has been performed to study oscillation evolution in linear stochastic car-following models. This paper extends the analysis to investigate the impact of leading speed pattern on oscillation evolution. Speed variance of each vehicle in the car-following platoon has been derived analytically, which reveals (i) If the underlying deterministic car-following model is stable, the speed variance yielded by stochastic linear car following model will converge to a constant value, which depends on the stochasticity strength, but is independent of the leading speed pattern. (ii) The amplitude of traffic oscillation might monotonically increase or change nonmonotonically, depending on the leading speed pattern. Numerical simulations are performed, and the results are in good agreement with the analytical ones. (C)& nbsp;2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Understanding the impact of leading speed pattern on traffic oscillation evolution is crucial in traffic flow studies. This paper extends the frequency-domain stability analysis to investigate this impact and provides numerical simulations to validate the analytical findings.