Heterogeneous traffic flow characteristics on the highway with a climbing lane under different truck percentages: The framework of Kerner’s three-phase traffic theory

Abstract Nowadays, in order to improve the traffic conditions in mountainous areas, the demand of climbing lanes is increasing. In this paper, car–truck heterogeneous traffic flow characteristics on the highway with a climbing lane are studied up based on an improved Kerner–Klenov–Schreckenberg–Wolf (KKSW) cellular automation (CA) model. To depict the speed characteristics of vehicle’s climbing and lane-changing behaviors, additional evolution rules for trucks are introduced into the KKSW model. Specifically, the motion of trucks climbing on the slope is described as a deceleration process and an equilibrium process. Furthermore, we define the probability of a truck driver using the climbing lane as a function of the observed real-time occupancy on it. We have found that in accordance with Kerner’s theory, traffic breakdown is an F → S transition that occurs in metastable free flow with respect to the F → S transition. When the traffic demand increases, the bottleneck appears due to the merging of trucks from the climbing lane to the inner lane. Localized synchronized flow patterns (LSP) emerge on both the inner and outer lanes. When traffic demand increases further, wide moving jams emerge in synchronized flow and general pattern (GP) appears on the inner lane, whereas synchronized flow patterns remain on the outer lane only. In addition, the macroscopic traffic flow characteristics under varying truck percentages are analyzed. We have found that the improving effect of climbing lane on traffic efficiency is closely related to the truck percentage.