Stability of anti-bunched buses and local unidirectional Kuramoto oscillators

Abstract

Inspired by our recent work that relates bus bunching as a phenomenon of synchronisation of phase oscillators, we construct a model of Kuramoto oscillators that follows an analogous interaction mechanism of local unidirectional coupling. In the bus loop system, we can introduce a no-boarding policy as a form of kicking force to achieve a stable staggered (anti-bunched) state. For Kuramoto oscillators, it turns out that such stable anti-bunched states can exist (without any additional kicking force) if the number of oscillators are at least five. This correspondence between the bus loop system and the local unidirectional Kuramoto oscillators leads to the insight on how the bus loop system can remain staggered.