The effect of visibility on road traffic during foggy weather conditions

The impact of fog on visibility is a major factor affecting traffic congestion and safety. This paper proposes a microscopic traffic model that captures the features of traffic in foggy weather and characterizes it based on visibility. The intelligent driver (ID) model is based on a constant acceleration exponent and produces similar traffic behaviour for all conditions, which is unrealistic. The performance of the ID and proposed models is evaluated on a 2.2 km ring road for 250 s with a platoon of 51 vehicles. Results are presented which show that the proposed model characterizes traffic realistically with lower acceleration and deceleration compared to the ID model. Further, it does not create stop-and-go waves and is stable even during foggy weather. The proposed model can be used to reduce fuel consumption and pollution resulting from traffic congestion. This study proposes a new microscopic traffic model, which realistically characterizes the traffic flow during foggy weather based on visibility unlike the existing intelligent driver model, which results in unrealistic traffic flow behaviour.image