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juli 04, 2004
Trafikköer
Häromdagen funderade Jeroen Wolfers i Bilköns dynamik kring bilköer, varför de uppstår och hur man ska kunna komma rätt med dem. I en kommentar länkade jag till några tidigare anteckningar om detta fascinerande fenomen.
New Scientist skriver idag mer om traffikköer i Bad driving the secret to traffic forecasts:
A traffic simulation system is helping drivers by predicting jams on Germany's autobahn network up to an hour before they happen. The secret of its success is to take into account the way real drivers - and their cars - behave.
...
But this synchronised flow is unstable. One car pulling into another lane and forcing the driver behind to brake hard is enough to start traffic bunching up. This can quickly develop into a jam that propagates backwards through the traffic like a wave. Failure to predict this "pinch effect" has stymied past attempts to model traffic flow.
Now Michael Schreckenberg and colleagues at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany have developed a computer model that successfully reproduces the pinch effect. "It is the first model to reproduce all known traffic states," says team member Robert Barlovic.
Systemet används i Tyskland, på Verkehrsinformationssystem autobahn. (Det finns en engelsktextad version för den som inte är så hemma på tyska: klicka på "english version" längst ner i vänsterspalten.)
Det har till viss del fallit på eget grepp eftersom bilförarna nu utnyttjar informationen som lämnas av systemet till att planera sin bilkörning vilket man tydligen inte hade räknat med (min fetning nedan):
Its forecasts, which predict conditions up to an hour ahead, are displayed on the web at www.autobahn.nrw.de. More than 90 per cent of time, it correctly predicts traffic density.
But the website has already become a victim of its own success, admits Schreckenberg. Some of the 300,000 people a day who are visiting the site are replanning their journeys on the basis of its forecasts, and this is beginning to make the forecasts themselves less accurate. And soon it could get even worse when the website becomes available on 3G cellphones, he says.
So the researchers are now trying to adjust the way the traffic information is provided to drivers to take this destructive effect into account. One idea, says Schreckenberg, might actually be to provide less complete traffic information to encourage drivers to adopt more varied strategies for evading congestion, so they do not all flock to the same exits.
Detta visar, om inte annat, att komplexa system är ... komplexa och väldigt svåra att förutse i sin helhet. Jag undrar om inte Thorvald med sin systemdynamiska känsla skulle insett dessa problem i ett långt tidigare skede. För mer i ämnet systemdynamik se t.ex. översiktsidan Systemdynamik - System Dynamics.
Se även:
Forskningsgruppens publikationer finns via menyvalet "Publications" eller via sidan för Robert Barlović. T.ex.
Mechanical restriction versus human overreaction triggering congested traffic states (PDF).
Pinch Effect in a Cellular Automaton (CA) Model for Tra c Flow (PDF)
Adaptive Traffic Light Control in the ChSch Model For City Traffic (PDF).
Posted by hakank at juli 4, 2004 10:02 FM Posted to Agentbaserad modellering | Komplexitet/emergens