Resonance, criticality, and emergence in city traffic investigated in cellular automaton models

Abstract

The complex behavior that occurs when traffic lights are synchronized is studied for a row of interacting cars. The system is modeled through a cellular automaton. Two strategies are considered: all lights in phase and a "green wave" with a propagating green signal. It is found that the mean velocity near the resonant condition follows a critical scaling law. For the green wave, it is shown that the mean velocity scaling law holds even for random separation between traffic lights and is not dependent on the density. This independence on car density is broken when random perturbations are considered in the car velocity. Random velocity perturbations also have the effect of leading the system to an emergent state, where cars move in clusters, but with an average velocity which is independent of traffic light switching for large injection rates.

Regular transport dynamics produce chaotic travel times

“…As well as representing a major global socioeconomic challenge in the 21st century, the problem of city traffic has developed into an active area of theoretical research [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12], in particular among physicists. The underlying assumption is that by understanding the collective dynamics of vehicles in realistic road layouts, insights can be gleaned which will translate into practical solutions.…”

Analytical Approximation of Fuel Consumption and Periodic Behaviors for a Vehicle that Travels Through a Traffic Light Series

“…In 2009, Varas researched whether the universal behavior close to resonance persists, when several cars interact along the same route. To know the behavior of this dynamics, used a cellular automaton model [11] . One of the most recent works in this respect, is the work carried out by Mesa in [12], where the description and comparison of four vehicle traffic models are presented.…”

Signal optimization in urban transport: A totally asymmetric simple exclusion process with traffic lights

“…Various features of traffic flow have been investigated in the framework of the TASEP such as overtaking [9], intersection of streets [10], flow at junctions [11], queuing process [12], anticipation effect [13], time and spatial headway at intersections [14], on-ramp simulation [15], pedestrianvehicles flow [16,17], roundabout [18] and shortcut [19]. Models of traffic flow at intersections have been also investigated by other approaches than the TASEP, mainly in discrete-time frameworks [20][21][22][23][24][25][26].…”