No Arabic abstract
In this paper, urban traffic is modeled using dual graph representation of urban transportation network where roads are mapped to nodes and intersections are mapped to links. The proposed model considers both the navigation of vehicles on the network and the motion of vehicles along roads. The roads capacity and the vehicle-turning ability at intersections are naturally incorporated in the model. The overall capacity of the system can be quantified by a phase transition from free flow to congestion. Simulation results show that the systems capacity depends greatly on the topology of transportation networks. In general, a well-planned grid can hold more vehicles and its overall capacity is much larger than that of a growing scale-free network.
This letter propose a new model for characterizing traffic dynamics in scale-free networks. With a replotted road map of cities with roads mapped to vertices and intersections to edges, and introducing the road capacity L and its handling ability at intersections C, the model can be applied to urban traffic system. Simulations give the overall capacity of the traffic system which is quantified by a phase transition from free flow to congestion. Moreover, we report the fundamental diagram of flow against density, in which hysteresis is found, indicating that the system is bistable in a certain range of vehicle density. In addition, the fundamental diagram is significantly different from single-lane traffic model and 2-D BML model with four states: free flow, saturated flow, bistable and jammed.
Mitigating traffic congestion on urban roads, with paramount importance in urban development and reduction of energy consumption and air pollution, depends on our ability to foresee road usage and traffic conditions pertaining to the collective behavior of drivers, raising a significant question: to what degree is road traffic predictable in urban areas? Here we rely on the precise records of daily vehicle mobility based on GPS positioning device installed in taxis to uncover the potential daily predictability of urban traffic patterns. Using the mapping from the degree of congestion on roads into a time series of symbols and measuring its entropy, we find a relatively high daily predictability of traffic conditions despite the absence of any a priori knowledge of drivers origins and destinations and quite different travel patterns between weekdays and weekends. Moreover, we find a counterintuitive dependence of the predictability on travel speed: the road segment associated with intermediate average travel speed is most difficult to be predicted. We also explore the possibility of recovering the traffic condition of an inaccessible segment from its adjacent segments with respect to limited observability. The highly predictable traffic patterns in spite of the heterogeneity of drivers behaviors and the variability of their origins and destinations enables development of accurate predictive models for eventually devising practical strategies to mitigate urban road congestion.
A traffic incident analysis method based on extended spectral envelope (ESE) method is presented to detect the key incident time. Sensitivity analysis of parameters (the length of time window, the length of sliding window and the study period) are discussed on four real traffic incidents in Beijing. The results show that: (1) Moderate length of time window got the best accurate in detection. (2) The shorter the sliding window is, the more accurate the key incident time are detected. (3) If the study period is too short, the end time of an incident cannot be detected. Empirical studies show that the proposed method can effectively discover the key incident time, which can provide a theoretic basis for traffic incident management.
Moderate length of time window can get the best accurate result in detecting the key incident time using extended spectral envelope. This paper presents a method to calculate the moderate length of time window. Two factors are mainly considered: (1) The significant vertical lines consist of negative elements of eigenvectors; (2) the least amount of interruption. The elements of eigenvectors are transformed into binary variable to eliminate the interruption of positive elements. Sine transform is introduced to highlight the significant vertical lines of negative elements. A novel Quality Index (QI) is proposed to measure the effect of different lengths of time window. Empirical studies on four real traffic incidents in Beijing verify the validity of this method.
Urban areas play an unprecedented role in potentially mitigating climate change and supporting sustainable development. In light of the rapid urbanisation in many parts on the globe, it is crucial to understand the relationship between settlement size and CO2 emission efficiency of cities. Recent literature on urban scaling properties of emissions as a function of population size have led to contradictory results and more importantly, lacked an in-depth investigation of the essential factors and causes explaining such scaling properties. Therefore, in analogy to the well-established Kaya Identity, we develop a relation combining the involved exponents. We demonstrate that application of this Urban Kaya Relation will enable a comprehensive understanding about the intrinsic factors determining emission efficiencies in large cities by applying it to a global dataset of 61 cities. Contrary to traditional urban scaling studies which use Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, we show that the Reduced Major Axis (RMA) is necessary when complex relations among scaling exponents are to be investigated. RMA is given by the geometric mean of the two OLS slopes obtained by interchanging the dependent and independent variable. We discuss the potential of the Urban Kaya Relation in main-streaming local actions for climate change mitigation.