Probabilistic Description of Traffic Breakdowns Caused by On-ramp Flow

Reinhart Kuhne; Ihor Lubashevsky; Reinhard Mahnke; Jevgenijs Kaupush

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · cond-mat/0405163

Probabilistic Description of Traffic Breakdowns Caused by On-ramp Flow

Reinhart Kuhne·Ihor Lubashevsky·Reinhard Mahnke·Jevgenijs Kaupush

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The characteristic features of traffic breakdown near on-ramp are analyzed. To describe this phenomenon the probabilistic description regarding the jam emergence as the formation of a large car cluster on highway inside the synchronized traffic is constructed. In these terms the breakdown occurs through the formation of a certain critical nucleus in the metastable vehicle flow, which is located near the on-ramp. The strong cooperative car interaction in the synchronized traffic enables us to treat the size of critical jam nuclei as a large value and to apply to an effective one-lane model. This model assumes the following. First, the growth of a car cluster is governed by the attachment of cars to the cluster whose rate is mainly specified by the total traffic flow. Second, the cluster dissolution is determined by the car escape from the cluster whose rate depends on the cluster size directly. Third, the generation of one-car clusters (preclusters) is caused by cars entering the main road from the on-ramp. The appropriate master equation for the car cluster evolution is written and the generation rate of critical jam nuclei is found. The obtained results are in agreement with the empirical facts that the characteristic time scale of the breakdown phenomenon is about or greater than one minute and the traffic flow rate interval inside which traffic breakdowns are observed is sufficiently wide. Besides, as a new results, it is shown that the traffic breakdown probability can be analyzed, at least approximately, based solely on the data of the total vehicle flow without separating it into the vehicle streams on the main road and on-ramp when the relative on-ramp flow volume exceeds 10%--20%.

Explore related subjects

cond-mat.soft cond-mat.stat-mech

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Reinhart Kuhne, Ihor Lubashevsky, Reinhard Mahnke, Jevgenijs Kaupush. 2004-05-08. Probabilistic Description of Traffic Breakdowns Caused by On-ramp Flow. https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0405163

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Controlling microalgae populations by phototactic memory

Motile microorganisms navigate environments that vary in space and time by coupling sensory inputs to internal physiological states and active motion. In photosynthetic microorganisms, such coupling can be mediated by phototaxis, yet how temporal sensing combines with spatial variations of the environment to shape population organisation remains poorly understood. To probe this coupling, we expose populations of the phototactic microalga \textit{Chlamydomonas reinhardtii} to structured light landscapes. Under ring-shaped illumination, cells robustly accumulate at the center of the illuminated region, rather than at the light-intensity maximum. Single-cell tracking shows that cells steer relative to local intensity gradients and undergo a non-trivial phototactic response, where, on average, cells outside the ring perform positive phototaxis while cells inside perform negative phototaxis. Population experiments, numerical simulations and analytical modelling show that this trapping cannot be reproduced by an instantaneous switching rule, but requires a finite phototactic memory acting on the transition between positive and negative phototaxis. This internal timescale couples to the geometry of the light field and to the persistence of active motion, enabling controllable spatial localisation without physical confinement. Our results generically show how memory in a single-cell sensory response can control population-level organisation in a living active system.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2026

Emergent odd response in active chiral films

Active chiral fluids can support an anomalous transport coefficient known as odd (or Hall) viscosity. Hydrodynamic descriptions of such fluids typically introduce odd viscosity phenomenologically. How such a response emerges from specific microscopic interactions remains incompletely understood. Here, building on classical shear rheology, we microscopically derive an odd rheological response in active chiral films: thin layers of torque-exerting, elongated particles anchored to a no-slip surface. A canonical realization of such a film is the bacterial carpet, in which flagellated bacteria are tethered head-down to a solid surface while their flagella remain free to spin and inject angular momentum into the surrounding fluid. Using a Smoluchowski kinetic theory for the orientational dynamics of these anchored particles, we derive their stress response to an imposed shear flow. We reveal that shear-induced reorientation leads to a flow-aligned polarization and a transverse surface traction from which the odd-viscosity tensor follows in closed form. This approach stands in contrast with existing microscopic theories, in which the axis of torque injection is insensitive to the flow rather than set by it. Numerical solutions of the kinetic theory further highlight saturation of the transverse traction at strong shear, driven by this orientation dynamics -- signaling departure from linear response. Our results demonstrate how odd viscosity can emerge self-consistently as a coarse-grained rheological signature of active fluid-structure interaction and establish active chiral films as a new controllable setting for odd hydrodynamics.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2026

Inclined surfaces bias bacterial swarming expansion and edge organization

Bacterial swarming is the collective expansion of dense populations of motile cells across hydrated soft surfaces, yet gravity is usually treated as a fixed background condition in standard horizontal assays. We used surface inclination to examine how agar-surface orientation relative to gravity affects the expansion of Enterobacter sp. SM3 swarms. At macroscopic scales, we found that colony expansion depended non-monotonically on inclination, with the strongest spreading at intermediate inclinations and weaker expansion under shallow or near-inverted conditions. Paired up-facing acute and down-facing obtuse configurations with the same tilt magnitude showed different expansion responses, suggesting that swarm expansion depended on both tilt magnitude and which side of the agar surface faced upward relative to gravity. Inclination also produced downhill-biased colony morphologies. For microscopic scales, particle image velocimetry (PIV) analysis showed generally lower mean activity under inclination than in the flat references, with a non-monotonic angular response. The downhill tip showed slower motion, shorter spatial correlations and smaller vortex cores than the upper region. To interpret the macroscopic trends, we extended a two-phase thin-film model by introducing an effective gravity coupling projected normal and tangential to the agar surface. Simulations suggest that the surface-tangential component mainly drives lateral redistribution, whereas the surface-normal component modifies film pressure and helps distinguish up-facing from down-facing configurations.

cond-mat.soft↗