Kinetic Modeling of Traffic Flow Embedding Nudging Force, Social Altruism or Full Cooperation: From a Microscopic to Macroscopic Scale

Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) are increasingly recognized as a significant trend in future transportation. This paper investigates three key research directions that enhance CAV capabilities: artificial traffic fluids, social coordination, and full cooperation. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of how these capabilities affect average speed, utilizing a Boltzmann-type approach to develop kinetic traffic flow models from microscopic to macroscopic scales. The binary interactions of CAVs with each capability are examined in detail. This paper analyzes nudging strategies, social coordination games, and full cooperation, deriving the corresponding evolution equations for average speed. Additionally, this paper studies the hydrodynamic model incorporating nudging force and its efficiency relative to traffic density. The impact of social value orientation on equilibrium speed at varying densities is also analyzed. Finally, this paper compares the equilibrium speed of CAV traffic flow under new capabilities with conventional traffic flow, finding that CAVs with these new capabilities exhibit higher equilibrium speeds, with nudging force yielding the highest speeds. These findings provide two key insights for improving traffic efficiency with CAVs.