Jorge Laval’s Traffic Flow Lab

Here you will find information and resources on vehicular traffic simulation models. Most of the models included in this website are based on the kinematic wave model (also known as the LWR model), which is the simplest model able to capture basic traffic dynamics features such as the propagation of congestion in the form of “waves”.

The models present in this website extend the kinematic wave model by treating each lane separately and by modeling vehicle’s bounded accelerations as moving bottlenecks. It has been found that when lane-changing vehicles or slow trucks are modeled in such a way, several puzzling traffic phenomena can be explained.

These are the simplest models (only 5 parameters!) able to predict traffic dynamics on congested freeway segments. For example, these models explain the relationship between lane-changing rates and capacity drop.