NONLINEAR DYNAMICS ANALYSIS OF TRAFFIC TIME SERIES

Abstract

Traffic flow shows various complex behaviors. Numerous empirical data and numerical simulation results demonstrate the existence of distinct dynamics states. In order to obtain insight into the nature of the dynamics, we apply the nonlinear time series analysis approach to study the characteristic behavior of traffic flow at low and intermediate density values. A procedure called "embedding scheme" has been used to reconstruct the representation of the time series which is obtained from the deterministic NaSch traffic model. In the reconstructed phase space, we investigate the regular attractor and the chaotic attractor of traffic time series. Our results indicate that nonlinear technique can be successfully used for understanding of dynamics feature of traffic flow.