Platoon Definitions and Analysis of Correlation between Number of Platoons and Jamming in Traffic System

Using an agent-based traffic models, we analyze the manner in which the number of platoons within a traffic system is correlated with the appearance of traffic jams. Two definitions of a platoon are proposed and verified using agent-based simulations to find the one that provides the most realistic representation of traffic behavior in a stochastic model. We observe that traffic jams are closely related to the convergence of multiple platoons into a single platoon containing all the agents in the model. We also observed that at high-density, traffic system maintains a metastable state when it has multiple platoons in it. A traffic jam occurs when these multiple platoons are merged into a single platoon, which is equivalent to the concept of an infinite cluster in percolation theory.