Central-upwind scheme for the phase-transition traffic flow model

Phase-transition models are an important family of non-equilibrium continuum traffic flow models, offering properties like replicating complex traffic phenomena, maintaining anisotropy, and promising potentials for accommodating automated vehicles. However, their complex mathematical characteristics such as discontinuous solution domains, pose numerical challenges and limit their exploration in traffic flow theory. This paper focuses on developing a robust and accurate numerical method for phase-transition traffic flow models: We propose a second-order semi-discrete central-upwind scheme specifically designed for phase-transition models. This novel scheme incorporates the projection onto appropriate flow domains, ensuring enhanced handling of discontinuities and maintaining physical consistency and accuracy. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme through extensive and challenging numerical tests, showcasing their potential to facilitate further research and application in phase-transition traffic flow modeling. The ability of phase-transition models to embed the “time-gap”—a crucial element in automated traffic control—as a conserved variable aligns seamlessly with the control logic of automated vehicles, presenting significant potential for future applications, and the proposed numerical scheme now substantially facilitates exploring such potentials.