Stability analysis of a multi-phase car-following model

This paper presents a numerical stability analysis of a multi-phase car-following model under mild to severe disturbances. The results show that local stability was always conformed. An asymptotically unstable region was found for traffic in congested states. One of the previously calibrated boundary conditions for close-following situations was found to be in conflict with the stable condition required by the car-following model, which had attributed to speed oscillations during transition of the traffic from a non-congested to a congested state. Suggestions were made to the choice of model parameter values to meet the stability conditions and ways to improve the model.