A new car-following model with the consideration of anticipation optimal velocity

•A new anticipation optimal velocity car-following model is proposed.•The anticipation effects on the stability of traffic flow have been explored.•The starting and braking process were carried out through simulation.•The anticipation effects of the optimal velocity can avoid the disadvantage of negative velocity.

In this paper, a new anticipation optimal velocity model (AOVM) is proposed by considering anticipation effect on the basis of the full velocity difference model (FVDM) for car-following theory on single lane. The linear stability condition is derived from linear stability analysis. Starting and braking process is investigated for the car motion under a traffic signal, which shows that the results accord with empirical traffic values. Especially AOVM can avoid the disadvantage of the unrealistically high deceleration appearing in FVDM. Furthermore, numerical simulation shows that AOVM might avoid the disadvantage of negative velocity and headway that occur at small sensitivity coefficients in the FVDM since the anticipation effect is taken into account in AOVM, which means that collision disappears with the consideration of an appropriate anticipation parameter.