Cellular automata model of car traffic in a two-dimensional street network

Abstract

We propose a road traffic cellular automata model suitable to an urban environment. North, east, south and west car displacements are possible and road crossings are naturally implemented as rotary junctions. We consider the traffic in a Manhattan-like city and study the flow diagram and the car density profile along road segments. We observe that the length of the car queues obeys a complex dynamics and is not uniform across the network. The street length between two junctions and the turning strategies at rotaries are relevant parameters of the model. Our results are also confirmed by fully continuous traffic simulations. PACS: 05.50+q, 64.60+Cn, 89.40+k 1 Introduction Cellular automata models for road traffic have received a great deal of interest during the past few years (see [1]-[5] for instance). One-dimensional models for single lane car motions are quite simple and elegant. The road is represented as a line of cells, each of them being occupied or not by a vehicle. All cars ...