A CELLULAR AUTOMATON FOR TRAFFIC JAM CAUSED BY RAILROAD CROSSING

Abstract

A cellular automaton has been used to simulate traffic ow and it has been shown that a cellular automaton is useful to simulate traffic ow. Kashii Sando in Fukuoka City is known as a notoriously busy road with a busy railroad crossing. Therefore, we focus on the road and introduce a cellular automaton model to simulate the bottleneck situation due to the embarrassing railroad crossing. Following the traffic regulations in Japan, we have to stop in front of the railroad crossing even if no train is in the railroad crossing. Then we introduce parameters for the stop time of cars in front of the crossing when no train is in the crossing. Furthermore, parameters such as traffic volume are introduced and set based on the real traffic data. Three types of experiments are performed, each of which has the same total interception time by the crossing. We show that a traffic jam is considerably affected by the time that cars are stopped at the crossing and the railroad crossing signal is effective to reduce traffic jam for Kashii Sando.