Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 64: Traffic Dynamics, Urban and Regional Systems (joint session SOE/DY)

DY 64.5: Talk

Thursday, March 15, 2018, 16:00–16:15, MA 001

Antipersistence of traffic flow explains congestion durations — •Sebastian M. Krause, Lars Habel, Thomas Guhr, and Michael Schreckenberg — Faculty of Physics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Lotharstr. 1, 47048 Duisburg, Germany

Many highways are running above their capacity and therefore suffer congested traffic. The traffic breakdown from free flow becomes increasingly likely around a critical flow, a critical number of vehicles per minute. Here we discuss congestion durations which are distributed with a power law over three decades, from minutes to hours [1]. This finding suggests a robust mechanism behind it. Using antipersistent stochastic modeling of the traffic flow, we are able to explain the distribution of congestion durations: The traffic flow shows large fluctuations on short time scales which quickly trend back to the mean value. Consequently, it exceeds the critical flow for time spans which are power law distributed.

[1] S. M. Krause, L. Habel, T. Guhr and M. Schreckenberg, 'The importance of antipersistence for traffic jams', EPL 118, 38005 (2017).