Impact Evaluation of a Traffic Circle through Macroscopic Traffic Flow Simulation

When a road has a high density of traffic, a small decrease in speed of a single vehicle can set off a chain of events which leads to a traffic jam. This phenomenon has the moniker"phantom jam,"because no apparent obstruction to traffic flow is observable. The wave of congestion it creates is called a "jamiton." Over the last few decades, mathematical models have been developed to analyze traffic flow on both a microscopic (attention to individual vehicles) and macroscopic level (traffic flow as a whole). In this project, traffic flow was simulated on both levels; the behavior of individual vehicles was modeled using the Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) method and a theoretical jamiton was modeled macroscopically using the Payne-Whitham (PW) method.