2025/03/31 by Ana M. C. Santos, Santos, Arturo Berrones, Gerardo Castillo +5
Engineering · Mathematics · #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn) #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Traffic control and management
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2503.24333
openalex publication_date 2025/03/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Theoretical arguments and empirical evidence for the emergence of macroscopic epidemic type behavior, in the form of Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) or Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) processes in urban traffic congestion from microscopic network flows is given. Moreover, it's shown that the emergence of SIS/SIR implies a relationship between traffic flow and density, which is consistent with observations of the so called Fundamental Diagram of Traffic (FDT), which is a characteristic signature of vehicle movement phenomena that spans multiple scales. Our results put in more firm grounds recent findings that indicate that traffic congestion at the aggregate level can be modeled by simple contagion dynamics.