New equilibria in a multilane model of highway traffic

Equilibria of a microscopic multilane traffic model are studied on a ring-road. The 'Minimising Overall Braking In Lane-changing' (MOBIL) framework is coupled with an optimal velocity acceleration law that includes relative velocity (OVRV). We choose initial data that are longitudinal equilibria of the OVRV model and determine the conditions that give rise to lane-changing. We analyse the lane-changing criteria and determine a macroscopic approximation of the rate of change of density between lanes for given initial data. We observe new phenomena for unstable parameter values where the density profile in each lane synchronises and illustrate the qualitative differences when lane-changing is allowed.