Published in:PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Keywords:resilience; scaling laws; spatiotemporal; traffic congestion; complex systems
Abstract:The concept of resilience can be realized in natural and engineering systems, representing the ability of a system to adapt and recover from various disturbances. Although resilience is a critical property needed for understanding and managing the risks and collapses of transportation systems, an accepted and useful definition of resilience for urban traffic as well as its statistical property under perturbations are still missing. Here, we define city traffic resilience based on the spatiotemporal clusters of congestion in real traffic and find that the resilience follows a scale-free distribution in 2D city road networks and 1D highways with different exponents but similar exponents on different days and in different cities. The traffic resilience is also revealed to have a scaling relation between the cluster size of the spatiotemporal jam and its recovery duration independent of microscopic details. Our findings of universal traffic resilience can provide an indication toward better understanding and designing of these complex engineering systems under internal and external disturbances.
About the author:
Hai-Jun Huang is the Cheng Kong professor of the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Beihang University). He is now the university’s vice president, and had served as the executive associate dean of the Graduate School from 2009 to 2015, the dean of the School of Economics and Management from 2007 to 2009. From 2000 to 2004, he was the vice director of the Department of Management Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China. He received his PhD in transport operations research from Beihang in 1992. His research interests include road traffic flow models, transport network modeling, travel behavior analysis and congested road-use pricing. He has published more than 150 papers in such international journals as Transportation Research series, OR, TS, etc. In 1998, he got the grant awarded for National Excellent Young Researchers; in 2005, the grant for Innovative Research Groups; in 2011, the national prize for Achievements in Natural Science; in 2012, the Fudan prize for Excellent Research in Management Sciences. In 2011, he was selected as the IAC member of ISTTT.
