2014/12/15 by Bo Yang, Yang, Bo, Christopher Monterola +1
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO) #Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases (nlin.CG) #Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Traffic Prediction and Management Techniques #Traffic control and management #Transportation Planning and Optimization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1412.4567
openalex publication_date 2014/12/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A simple algorithm for constructing an effective traffic model is presented. The algorithm uses statistically well-defined quantities extracted from the flow-density plot, and the resulting effective model naturally captures and predicts many quantitative and qualitative empirical features of the highway traffic, especially with the presence of an on-ramp bottleneck. The simplicity of the effective model provides strong evidence that stochasticity, diversity of vehicle types and modeling of complicated driving behaviors are not fundamental to many observations in the complex real traffic dynamics. We also propose the nature of the congested phase can be well characterized by the long lasting transient states of the effective model, from which the wide moving jams evolve.