Density waves and jamming transition in cellular automaton models for traffic flow

Abstract

. In this paper computer simulation results of higher-order density correlations for cellular automaton models of traffic flow are presented. The examinations show the jamming transition as a function of both the density and the magnitude of noise and allow one to calculate the velocity of upstream moving jams. This velocity is independent of the density and decreases with growing noise. The point of maximum flow in the fundamental diagram determines its value. For that it is not necessary to explicitly define jams in the language of the selected model, but only based upon the well defined characteristic density profiles along the line. 1. Introduction Recently, the examination and modelling of vehicular traffic has become an important subject of research---see [1--5] and references therein for a brief review. In the microscopic approach to the traffic flow problem, the cellular automaton introduced in [6] reproduces important entities of real traffic, like the flow--density relation ...