An improved cellular automaton model with the consideration of a multi-point tollbooth

Based on the classical Nagel–Schreckenberg model, we in this paper propose an improved cellular automaton (CA) model to study the influences of a multi-point tollbooth on traffic flow. The numerical results show that the multi-point tollbooth can be looked at as a bottleneck and that it can improve the road capacity compared with other tolling stations, which shows that the proposed model is more effective than other traffic flow models. In addition, the results can help readers to better understand the effects of a multi-point tollbooth on traffic flow and help traffic engineers to reasonably design the tolling station.