Abstract Summary
Congestion observed in the transportation systems aggregates various amounts of uncertainty at different levels, making it challenging to achieve a clear understanding regarding empirically-observed traffic instabilities. In the literature, lane changing has been frequently indicated as an important factor of oscillations under high-density flows (Ahn and Cassidy, 2007; Laval and Leclercq, 2010; Zheng, 2014). But oscillations appear also on one-lane roads when a small fluctuation caused by single-vehicle amplifies eventually leading to a jam (Stern et al., 2018). Modelling these phenomena is not a simple task. At microscopic level, for example, many car-following (CF) models, which explicitly reproduce the dynamics governing the actions of the driver-vehicle system while following another vehicle, are not able to properly reproduce traffic oscillation in a satisfactorily way. For this reason, new CF models are regularly introduced with increasing levels of complexity. However, in many cases, this does not lead to an improved understanding of traffic phenomena or to a better traffic simulation as it is difficult to have sufficient data to correctly characterize them.
