BPCPPDYSOE21 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 10: Transport, Regional and Urban Dynamics
SOE 10.4: Talk
Wednesday, March 24, 2021, 14:00–14:20, SOEa
Purely fluctuation-induced congestion in street traffic — •Verena Krall1, Max Burg2,3, Malte Schröder1, and Marc Timme1 — 1Chair for Network Dynamics, Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed) and Institute of Theoretical Physics, Technical University Dresden, Germany — 2Institute for Theoretical Physics and Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, University of Tübingen, Germany — 3Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany
Traffic congestions may emerge spontaneously - out of nowhere. Statistical physics studies provide both qualitative and quantitative insights, yet so far they focused on the consequences of external factors such as street bottlenecks or human behavioral imperfections. Here we present a simple model of traffic flow on a street segment in which congestion spontaneously emerges purely due to fluctuations in the number of incoming vehicles [1]. Agent-based simulations and analytical estimates indicate that this instability exists even in regimes where mean field theory predicts stable traffic flow. Our results thus underline the limitations of mean field analysis for predicting the collective nonlinear dynamics of mobility systems.
[1] V. Krall et al., Number Fluctuations Induce Persistent Congestion, Transport Findings, December 2020. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.18154.