A conservative scheme for non-classical solutions to a strongly coupled PDE-ODE problem

Abstract

We consider a strongly coupled PDE-ODE system that describes the influence of a slow and large vehicle on road traffic. The model consists of a scalar conservation law describing the main traffic evolution and an ODE accounting for the trajectory of the slower vehicle that depends on the downstream traffic density. The moving constraint is operated by an inequality on the flux, which accounts for the bottleneck created on the road by the presence of the slower vehicle. We introduce a conservative scheme for the constrained hyperbolic PDE and a tracking algorithm for the ODE. We show numerical tests and compute numerically the order of convergence.