Phase transition at an on-ramp in the Nagel–Schreckenberg traffic flow model

Rui Jiang and Qing-Song Wu

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2006, vol. 366, issue C, 523-529

Abstract: Recent empirical observations show that traffic flow is related to various phase transitions, especially at bottlenecks. This paper studies traffic flow induced by an on-ramp in the Nagel–Schreckenberg model. It is shown that when considering the situation that vehicles on main road and on-ramp interact in a relatively long road section, first-order phase transition from free flow to congested flow occurs. In contrast, it is second-order phase transition from free flow to congested flow if the interaction road section is short. We have investigated the reason why first-order phase transition occurs. The interaction of vehicles may be viewed as a kind of cooperation behavior of drivers. Therefore, our results indicate that in future traffic flow research, investigation on cooperation behavior should be carried out.

Keywords: Traffic flow; Phase transition; On-ramp (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437105011222
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:366:y:2006:i:c:p:523-529

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2005.10.026

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().