98
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Traffic and Related Self-Driven Many-Particle Systems

      Preprint

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Since the subject of traffic dynamics has captured the interest of physicists, many astonishing effects have been revealed and explained. Some of the questions now understood are the following: Why are vehicles sometimes stopped by so-called ``phantom traffic jams'', although they all like to drive fast? What are the mechanisms behind stop-and-go traffic? Why are there several different kinds of congestion, and how are they related? Why do most traffic jams occur considerably before the road capacity is reached? Can a temporary reduction of the traffic volume cause a lasting traffic jam? Under which conditions can speed limits speed up traffic? Why do pedestrians moving in opposite directions normally organize in lanes, while similar systems are ``freezing by heating''? Why do self-organizing systems tend to reach an optimal state? Why do panicking pedestrians produce dangerous deadlocks? All these questions have been answered by applying and extending methods from statistical physics and non-linear dynamics to self-driven many-particle systems. This review article on traffic introduces (i) empirically data, facts, and observations, (ii) the main approaches to pedestrian, highway, and city traffic, (iii) microscopic (particle-based), mesoscopic (gas-kinetic), and macroscopic (fluid-dynamic) models. Attention is also paid to the formulation of a micro-macro link, to aspects of universality, and to other unifying concepts like a general modelling framework for self-driven many-particle systems, including spin systems. Subjects such as the optimization of traffic flows and relations to biological or socio-economic systems such as bacterial colonies, flocks of birds, panics, and stock market dynamics are discussed as well.

          Related collections

          Most cited references417

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Pattern formation outside of equilibrium

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Evolutionary games and spatial chaos

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: found
              Is Open Access

              Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles

              A simple model with a novel type of dynamics is introduced in order to investigate the emergence of self-ordered motion in systems of particles with biologically motivated interaction. In our model particles are driven with a constant absolute velocity and at each time step assume the average direction of motion of the particles in their neighborhood with some random perturbation (\(\eta\)) added. We present numerical evidence that this model results in a kinetic phase transition from no transport (zero average velocity, \(| {\bf v}_a | =0\)) to finite net transport through spontaneous symmetry breaking of the rotational symmetry. The transition is continuous since \(| {\bf v}_a |\) is found to scale as \((\eta_c-\eta)^\beta\) with \(\beta\simeq 0.45\).
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                13 December 2000
                2001-04-23
                Article
                10.1103/RevModPhys.73.1067
                cond-mat/0012229
                807b6f96-860f-4190-bf19-b59fe25dde6f
                History
                Custom metadata
                Reviews of Modern Physics 73(4), 1067-1141 (2001)
                A shortened version of this article will appear in Reviews of Modern Physics, an extended one as a book. The 63 figures were omitted because of storage capacity. For related work see http://www.helbing.org/
                cond-mat.stat-mech

                Condensed matter
                Condensed matter

                Comments

                Comment on this article