Air Pollutant Emissions in the Fukui-Ishibashi and Nagel-Schreckenberg Traffic Cellular Automata

Abstract

Vehicular traffic is a hard problem in big cities. Internal combustion vehicles are the main fossil fuel consumers and frame the main source of urban air pollutants, such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds. Vehicular traffic is also a promoter of climate change due to its greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO and CO2. Awareness of the spatiotemporal distribution of urban traffic, including the velocity distribution, allows knowing the spatiotemporal distribution of the air pollutant vehicular emissions required to understand urban air pollution. Although no well-established traffic theory exists, some models and approaches, like cellular automata, have been proposed to study the main aspects of this phenomenon. In this paper, a simple approach for estimating the space-time distribution of the air pollutant emission rates in traffic cellular automata is proposed. It is discussed with the Fukui-Ishibashi (FI) and Nagel-Schreckenberg (NS) models for traffic flow of identical vehicles in a single lane. We obtained the steady-state emission rates of the FI and NS models, being larger those produced by the first one, with relative differences of up to 45% in hydrocarbons, 56% in carbon monoxide, and 77% in nitrogen oxides.