Highway Traffic Stability
Event details
| Date | 24.03.2011 |
| Hour | 12:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. R.E. Wilson, University of Southampton |
| Location |
GC C3 30
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Most drivers will recognize the scenario: you are making steady progress along the motorway when suddenly you come to a sudden halt at the tail end of a lengthy queue of traffic. When you move off again you look for the cause of the jam but there isn't one. No accident damaged cars no breakdown no dead animal and no debris strewn on the road. So what caused everyone to stop?" RAC news release (2005)
The (by now well-known) answer is that such "phantom traffic jams" exist as waves that propagate upstream (opposite to the driving direction) - so that the vast majority of individuals do not observe the instant at which the jam was created - yet what exactly goes on at that instant is still a matter of debate. In this talk I'll give an overview of empirical data and models to describe such spatiotemporal patterns. The key property we need is instability: and using the framework of car-following (CF) models I'll show how different sorts of linear (convective and absolute) and nonlinear instability can be used to explain the empirical patterns.
References:
R.E. Wilson Mechanisms for spatio-temporal pattern formation in highway traffic models. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: part A 366:2017-2032 2008.
J.A. Ward and R.E. Wilson. Criteria for convective versus absolute string instability in car-following models. Proceedings of the Royal Society:
part A 2011 in press. Published on-line before print
doi:10.1098/rspa.2010.0437
Biography:
Eddie Wilson is a Mathematician by background with MA and DPhil degrees from Oxford. In 2000 he secured his first Faculty position in the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol
(England) - where he later became Reader. During his time in Bristol he worked on the mathematical modelling of a variety of engineering applications but with an increasing focus in road transport problems.
In 2007 he was awarded the prestigious EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship and in 2010 he moved to the Transportation Research Group at the University of Southampton where he is Professor of Modelling and Simulation.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Prof. Nikolas Geroliminis