An Application of Social Force Approach for Motorcycle Dynamics

Abstract

Many researches have analyzed the characteristics of car traffic flow. However, there are limited studies focusing on mixed traffic flow which is very common in developing countries. In a mixed traffic flow, the behavior of cars can be considered as lane-based movement. But motorcycles have non-lane movement because they change their direction and speed very often. Therefore, the paper aims to investigate the mechanisms of interactions between motorcycles in their non-lane movement. This study plan to develop a new approach to describe dynamic movement of motorcycles based on social force approach that is commonly applied to pedestrians. Microscopic data collected from video images taken in a road intersection of Hanoi, Vietnam was used for model validation. Parameters were estimated by using SPSS software with non-linear regression method. The result shows that proposed approach can make reasonable prediction of the histogram choice of speed and direction of dynamic movement.