Shadow traffic: A unified model for abnormal traffic behavior simulation

Abnormal traffic behaviors are common traffic phenomena. Existing traffic simulators focus on showing how traffic flow develops after an anomaly occurs; however, they cannot depict the anomaly itself. In this paper, we introduce the concept of shadow traffic for modeling traffic anomalies in a unified way in traffic simulations. We transform the properties of anomalies to the properties of shadow vehicles and then describe how these shadow vehicles participate in traffic simulations. Our model can be incorporated into most existing traffic simulators with little computational overhead. Moreover, experimental results demonstrate that our model is capable of simulating a variety of abnormal traffic behaviors realistically and efficiently. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.