City traffic jam relief by stochastic resonance

F. Castillo, B.A. Toledo, V. Muñoz, J. Rogan, R. Zarama, M. Kiwi and J.A. Valdivia

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2014, vol. 403, issue C, 65-70

Abstract: We simulate traffic in a city by means of the evolution of a row of interacting cars, using a cellular automaton model, in a sequence of traffic lights synchronized by a “green wave”. When our initial condition is a small density jammed state, its evolution shows the expected scaling laws close to the synchronization resonance, with a uniform car density along the street. However, for an initial large density jammed state, we observe density variations along the streets, which results in the breakdown of the scaling laws. This spatial disorder corresponds to a different attractor of the system. As we include velocity perturbations in the dynamics of the cars, all these attractors converge to a statistically equivalent system for all initial jammed densities. However, this emergent state shows a stochastic resonance-like behavior in which the average traffic velocity increases with respect to that of the system without noise, for several initial jammed densities. This result may help in the understanding of dynamics of traffic jams in cities.

Keywords: Traffic dynamics; Fluctuation; Traffic signal; Emergent state (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437114000892
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:403:y:2014:i:c:p:65-70

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2014.01.068

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 ().