Improvement of traffic percolation based on bottlenecks

Abstract

The formation process of global traffic flow from isolated local traffic flows can be considered as a percolation process. During this transition, the critical traffic bottleneck plays an important role in maintaining the global functional connectivity of the whole system. However, little attention has been paid to how the traffic percolation will be benefited from the improvements of traffic percolation bottlenecks. Here, we study the improvement of traffic bottlenecks in a traffic model and find that the traffic bottlenecks can greatly affect the organization efficiency of traffic flow. We propose a method of traffic bottlenecks load-reducing, which shows a significant improvement of traffic percolation on the network scale under different traffic conditions. Comparing with different methods, we demonstrate the advantage of the method of traffic bottlenecks load-reducing in the improvement of traffic percolation. Our findings may provide new insights for the research of bottlenecks and develop effective measures to improve the traffic reliability in real traffic.