A front tracking method for a strongly coupled PDE-ODE system with moving density constraints in traffic flow

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a numerical method for tracking a bus trajectory on a road network. The mathematical model taken into consideration is a strongly coupled PDE-ODE system: the PDE is a scalar hyperbolic conservation law describing the traffic ow while the ODE, that describes the bus trajectory, needs to be intended in a Carathéodory sense. The moving constraint is given by an inequality on the flux which accounts for the bottleneck created by the bus on the road. The finite volume algorithm uses a locally non-uniform moving mesh which tracks the bus position. Some numerical tests are shown to describe the behavior of the solution.