Research
Traffic flow theory
Macroscopic and microscopic models of how vehicles aggregate into flow, congestion, and breakdown.
Traffic flow theory remains the structural language of transportation engineering. Our work in this thread strengthens that language for an era in which vehicles are no longer interchangeable units. We study car-following and lane-changing behavior, the conditions under which fundamental diagrams hold or break, and the propagation of disturbances in heterogeneous traffic streams.
Recent questions include: How does the variance in driver behavior — amplified or dampened by ADAS — change capacity at active bottlenecks? When mixed-autonomy traffic violates the assumptions of LWR-class models, what minimal extensions recover predictive power without overfitting? When does signal-control theory remain robust in congested urban networks, and when does it not?
Selected papers
- Li, Chen, Zhou, Laval, Xie. Car-following behavior characteristics of adaptive cruise control vehicles based on empirical experiments. Transportation Research Part B.
- Li, Chen, Zhou, Xie, Laval. Fundamental diagrams of commercial adaptive cruise control: worldwide experimental evidence. Transportation Research Part C.
- Zhou, A. Zhou, Li, Chen, Peeta, Laval. Significance of low-level control to string stability under adaptive cruise control: algorithms, theory and experiments. Transportation Research Part C.
- Zhou, A. Zhou, Li, Chen, Peeta, Laval. Congestion-mitigating MPC design for adaptive cruise control based on Newell’s car-following model: history outperforms prediction. Transportation Research Part C.
- Zhou, Toth, Guensler, Laval. Hybrid modeling of lane changes near freeway diverges. Transportation Research Part B.
- Laval, Zhou. Congested urban networks tend to be insensitive to signal settings: implications for learning-based control. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
See the full publications page for the rest.