Asymptotically compatibility of a class of numerical schemes for a nonlocal traffic flow model

This paper considers numerical discretization of a nonlocal conservation law modeling vehicular traffic flows involving nonlocal inter-vehicle interactions. The nonlocal model involves an integral over the range measured by a horizon parameter and it recovers the local Lighthill-Richards-Whitham model as the nonlocal horizon parameter goes to zero. Good numerical schemes for simulating these parameterized nonlocal traffic flow models should be robust with respect to the change of the model parameters but this has not been systematically investigated in the literature. We fill this gap through a careful study of a class of finite volume numerical schemes with suitable discretizations of the nonlocal integral, which include several schemes proposed in the literature and their variants. Our main contributions are to demonstrate the asymptotically compatibility of the schemes, which includes both the uniform convergence of the numerical solutions to the unique solution of nonlocal continuum model for a given positive horizon parameter and the convergence to the unique entropy solution of the local model as the mesh size and the nonlocal horizon parameter go to zero simultaneously. It is shown that with the asymptotically compatibility, the schemes can provide robust numerical computation under the changes of the nonlocal horizon parameter.