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- Title
A simple contagion process describes spreading of traffic jams in urban networks.
- Authors
Saberi, Meead; Hamedmoghadam, Homayoun; Ashfaq, Mudabber; Hosseini, Seyed Amir; Gu, Ziyuan; Shafiei, Sajjad; Nair, Divya J.; Dixit, Vinayak; Gardner, Lauren; Waller, S. Travis; González, Marta C.
- Abstract
The spread of traffic jams in urban networks has long been viewed as a complex spatio-temporal phenomenon that often requires computationally intensive microscopic models for analysis purposes. In this study, we present a framework to describe the dynamics of congestion propagation and dissipation of traffic in cities using a simple contagion process, inspired by those used to model infectious disease spread in a population. We introduce two macroscopic characteristics for network traffic dynamics, namely congestion propagation rate β and congestion dissipation rate μ. We describe the dynamics of congestion spread using these new parameters embedded within a system of ordinary differential equations, similar to the well-known susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model. The proposed contagion-based dynamics are verified through an empirical multi-city analysis, and can be used to monitor, predict and control the fraction of congested links in the network over time. Predicting and controlling traffic congestion propagation is an ongoing challenge in most urban settings. Here, Seberi et al. apply a contagion model describing epidemic spread in population to model traffic jams, and verify its validity using large-scale data from six different cities around the world.
- Subjects
TRAFFIC congestion; CITY traffic; ORDINARY differential equations; TRAFFIC engineering; MICROSCOPY
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2020, Vol 11, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-020-15353-2