Exactly solvable cellular automaton traffic jam model

Abstract

A detailed study is undertaken of the nu(max)=1 limit of the cellular automaton traffic model proposed by Nagel and Paczuski [Phys. Rev. E 51, 2909 (1995)]. The model allows one to analyze the behavior of a traffic jam initiated in an otherwise freely flowing stream of traffic. By mapping onto a discrete-time queueing system, itself related to various problems encountered in lattice combinatorics, exact results are presented in relation to the jam lifetime, the maximum jam length, and the jam mass (the space-time cluster size or integrated vehicle waiting time), both in terms of the critical and the off-critical behavior. This sets existing scaling results in their natural context and also provides other several interesting results in addition.

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