Traffic disruption and recovery in road networks

Abstract

We study the impact of disruptions on road networks, and the recovery process after the disruption is removed from the system. Such disruptions could be caused by vehicle breakdown or illegal parking. We analyze the transient behavior using domain wall theory, and compare these predictions with simulations of a stochastic cellular automaton model. We find that the domain wall model can reproduce the time evolution of flow and density during the disruption and the recovery processes, for both one-dimensional systems and two-dimensional networks.