Exactly Solvable Single Lane Highway Traffic Model With Tollbooths.pdfVIP

a r X i v : c o n d - m a t / 0 0 1 0 2 0 8 v 2 [ c o n d - m a t .s t a t - m e c h ] 1 0 F e b 2 0 0 1 Exactly Solvable Single Lane Highway Traffic Model With Tollbooths H. F. Chau1?, Hao Xu1,2 and L.-G. Liu2 1 Department of Physics, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China 2 Department of Physics, Zhongshan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510275, China (February 1, 2008) Tolls are collected on many highways as a means of traffic control and revenue generation. How- ever, the presence of tollbooths on highway surely slows down traffic flow. Here, we investigate how the presence of tollbooths affect the average car speed using a simple-minded single lane determin- istic discrete traffic model. More importantly, the model is exactly solvable. PACS numbers: 45.70.Vn, 05.60.-k, 89.40.+k Modern computing power allows us to simulate highway and city traffic by looking at the microscopic behaviors of all cars. Perhaps the most well-known model of this kind is the cellular automaton based Biham-Middleton-Levine (BML) model of two-dimensional city traffic [1]. Numerical simulations of this model strongly suggest that a first order phase transition from the full-speed phase to the completely jamming phase occurs as the car density of the system increases. Moreover, this phase transition is primarily the result of the exclusion volume effect [1,2]. In spite of its simplicity, very little rigorous result is known for the BML model [3]. Different generations and variations of the BML model have been investigated in the literature [4]. These gen- eralizations focus on different aspects of the problem. They include the introduction of more realistic traffic rules [5], study of the effects of over-passes and faulty traffic lights [6], application of cellular automaton based traffic rules to single and multiple lane highway traffic [7] and investigation of higher dimensional traffic behaviors [8]. In particular, Nagel and Schreckenberg [9] proposed a model