Time-headway distribution for periodic totally asymmetric exclusion process with various updates

Abstract

The totally asymmetric exclusion process (TASEP) with periodic boundaries is considered as traffic flow model. The large-L approximation of the stationary state is used for the derivation of the time-headway distribution (an important microscopic characteristics of traffic flow) for the model with generalized update (genTASEP) in both, forward- and backward-sequential representation. The usually used updates, fully-parallel and regular forward- and backward-sequential, are analysed as special cases of the genTASEP. It is shown that only for those cases, the time-headway distribution is determined by the flow regardless to the density. The qualitative comparison of the results with traffic data demonstrates that the genTASEP with backward order and attractive interaction evinces similar properties of time-headway distribution as the real traffic sample.