2008/04/30 by Bin Jiang, Sijian Zhao, Junjun Yin · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Traffic control and management #Urban Design and Spatial Analysis #physics.data-an #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2008/07/p07008
published as Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2008 July · 23 pages, 16 figures
arxiv created 2008/07/05 · openalex publication_date 2008/07/09 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we extended road-based topological analysis to both nationwide and urban road networks, and concentrated on a sensitivity study with respect to the formation of self-organized natural roads based on the Gestalt principle of good continuity. Both Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) and Global Positioning System (GPS) data were used to correlate with a series of ranking metrics including five centrality-based metrics and two PageRank metrics. It was found that there exists a tipping point from segment-based to road-based network topology in terms of correlation between ranking metrics and their traffic. To our big surprise, (1) this correlation is significantly improved if a selfish rather than utopian strategy is adopted in forming the self-organized natural roads, and (2) point-based metrics assigned by summation into individual roads tend to have a much better correlation with traffic flow than line-based metrics. These counter-intuitive surprising findings constitute emergent properties of self-organized natural roads, which are intelligent enough for predicting traffic flow, thus shedding substantial insights into the understanding of road networks and their traffic from the perspective of complex networks. Keywords: topological analysis, traffic flow, phase transition, small world, scale free, tipping point