Abstract
We have revealed statistical physics of synchronized traffic flow that is governed by a spatiotemporal competition between and instabilities (where , , and denote, respectively, the free flow, synchronized flow, and wide moving jam traffic phases). A probabilistic analysis of synchronized flow based on simulations of a cellular automaton model in the framework of three-phase traffic theory is made. This probabilistic analysis shows that there is a finite range of the initial space gap between vehicles in synchronized flow within which during a chosen time for traffic observation either synchronized flow persists with probability , or an transition occurs with probability , or else an transition occurs with probability . Space-gap dependencies of the probabilities , , and have been found. It has been also found that (i) an initial instability can lead to sequences of transitions; (ii) an initial instability can lead to sequences of transitions. Each of the phase transitions in the sequences transitions and transitions exhibits the nucleation nature; these sequences of phase transitions determine spatiotemporal features of traffic patterns resulting from the competition between and instabilities. The statistical features of synchronized flow found for a homogeneous road remain qualitatively for a road with a bottleneck. However, rather than nuclei for and instabilities occurring at random road locations of the homogeneous road, due to a permanent nonhomogeneity introduced by the bottleneck, nuclei for initial and instabilities appear mostly at the bottleneck.
19 More- Received 19 March 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.100.012303
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