Two-lane lattice hydrodynamic model considering the empirical lane-changing rate

Abstract As a common behavior, lane changing has a significant influence on traffic flow. Lane changing is heavily dependent on the surrounding environment, so having a constant lane-changing rate in a traffic flow model would be unreasonable. Through an analysis of three empirical lane-changing datasets, we find that the lane-changing rate depends on traffic density. The structure of the lane-changing rate is similar to an optimization velocity function. We propose a new two-lane lattice model by modifying the lane-changing rate in the conservation equation. The linear stability of the new model and the effects of the parameters in the lane-changing rate on linear stability are analyzed through theory and simulation. Moreover, the new model and Nagatani's two-lane model are compared with actual observation results, which shows that the new model can better reproduce the observation results.