Hello,
the success of lane changing depends mainly on 3 things
- the required safety gaps on the target lane: these are computed by the car-following model). In the latest development version they can be further tuned for all models using the parameter lcAssertive
- the available gaps on the target lane: this mainly depends on traffic density
- cooperative speed adjustments by the vehicles. This should always be performed for strategic lane changing but its effectiveness highly depends on traffic density (also, it can be disabled using lcCooperative)
In your picture it looks as if lane-changing still takes place albeit with reduced flow because the traffic has already moved into a jammed state. This could easily be caused by intermittent higher traffic density. If the traffic density was to be reduced for some time, I would expected the traffic state to move back to smooth lane-changing and higher flow.
The lcStrategic parameter currently affects the distance the vehicles reserve for a strategic lane change. Currently this distance also has a constant positive term which is not affected by lcStrategic and thus, strategic changing always takes place (maybe this ought to be changed).
Other kinds of motivations (lcSpeedGain, ...) can be switched of.
To disable strategic lane changing you could use traci.vehicle.setLaneChangeMode.
regards,
Jakob