A Statistical Approach to Vehicular Traffic

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cellular automaton model for city traffic flow, analyzing how vehicle velocity depends on density and identifying a critical point where jamming occurs, supported by analytical and numerical results.

Contribution

It presents a novel two-dimensional cellular automaton model incorporating realistic traffic rules for urban traffic flow analysis.

Findings

Average vehicle velocity decreases sharply at a critical density.

Analytical results match numerical simulations in low-density regimes.

Jamming occurs beyond a specific traffic density threshold.

Abstract

A two-dimensional cellular automaton is introduced to model the flow and jamming of vehicular traffic in cities. Each site of the automaton represents a crossing where a finite number of cars can wait approaching the crossing from each of the four directions. The flow of cars obeys realistic traffic rules. We investigate the dependence of the average velocity of cars on the global traffic density. At a critical threshold for the density the average velocity reduces drastically caused by jamming. For the low density regime we provide analytical results which agree with the numerical results.