Ali Abdi - Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering, Imam Khomeini International University, Ghazvin, Iran
Mahmoud Saffarzadeh - Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
Arsalan Salehikalam - MSc. Student, Department of Civil Engineering, Azad Islamic University, South Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran

Stop and go traffic that leads to oscillate traffic flow frequently is observed on congestion flow. Unexpected reasonssuch as lane – changing maneuvers, lower speeds of leader vehicle and moving bottleneck cause stop and go trafficand amplifying delay and environment impacts. Stop and go traffic exactly can’t be modeled by traffic models, andalso car following models based on kinematic flow theory can’t be implied correct perception of stop and go traffic.Based on asymmetric microscopic theory and trajectory data of NGSIM, traffic flow can be classified into five phasesaccording to speed and movement of the vehicle: Free flow, acceleration and deceleration, stationary and coastingphases. Analyzing stop and go traffic based on asymmetric theory of acceleration and deceleration phase will resultto classify them into three cases: generation, growth and dissipation of traffic waves. Analyzing of traffic oscillationimplies that stop-and-go traffic is relatively small and can’t be propagated upstream unless the following traffic is alsonear D-curve; while the effect on lane changes are greater, and can propagate even the following traffic is not near theD-curve. In this paper, using time window in trajectory data clarify relation between the total number of lane changesand stop-and-go waves for congestion traffic. Analyzing net lane changes inside the searching window for incomingand outgoing lane changes about growth and dissipation of traffic waves indicate how characteristics of stop-and-gowaves are intimately related to driver’s asymmetric behavior of acceleration and deceleration. The comparison resulton the growth and dissipation indicated that under the same net lane changes, growth wave case occupy the regionsin fundamental diagram, flow – density diagram, deceleration curve, and dissipation wave case occupy the regions offlow – density, acceleration curve.

Traffic oscillation, stop-and-go traffic, asymmetric theory, lane-changing maneuver, acceleration anddeceleration wave