Phase transition in traffic jam experiment on a circuit

By S. Tadaki, M. Kikuchi, M. Fukui, A. Nakayama, K. Nishinari, A. Shibata, Y. Sugiyama, T. Yosida, S. Yukawa. 2013

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The emergence of a traffic jam is considered to be a dynamical phase transition in a physics point of view; traffic flow becomes unstable and changes phase into a traffic jam when the car density exceeds a critical value. In order to verify this view, we have been performing a series of circuit experiments. In our previous work (2008 New J. Phys. 10 033001), we demonstrated that a traffic jam emerges even in the absence of bottlenecks at a certain high density. In this study, we performed a larger indoor circuit experiment in the Nagoya Dome in which the positions of cars were observed using a high-resolution laser scanner. Over a series of sessions at various values of density, we found that jammed flow occurred at high densities, whereas free flow was conserved at low densities. We also found indications of metastability at an intermediate density. The critical density is estimated by analyzing the fluctuations in speed and the density–flow relation. The value of this critical density is consistent with that observed on real expressways. This experiment provides strong support for physical interpretations of the emergence of traffic jams as a dynamical phase transition.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Ocean Engineering, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6419a9ddee3c30a8e95b321e8176e2fba57e2215

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In Control and Systems Engineering

  1. Benedetto Piccoli
  2. D. Work
  3. Mauro Garavello

In Ocean Engineering

  1. Benedetto Piccoli
  2. Mauro Garavello

In Transportation

  1. Benedetto Piccoli
  2. D. Work

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