Abstract
Percolation transition is widely observed in networks ranging from biology to engineering. While much attention has been paid to network topologies, studies rarely focus on critical percolation phenomena driven by network dynamics. Using extensive real data, we study the critical percolation properties in city traffic dynamics. Our results suggest that two modes of different critical percolation behaviors are switching in the same network topology under different traffic dynamics. One mode of city traffic (during nonrush hours or days off) has similar critical percolation characteristics as small world networks, while the other mode (during rush hours on working days) tends to behave as a 2D lattice. This switching behavior can be understood by the fact that the high-speed urban roads during nonrush hours or days off (that are congested during rush hours) represent effective long-range connections, like in small world networks. Our results might be useful for understanding and improving traffic resilience.
Highlights
Percolation transition is widely observed in networks ranging from biology to engineering
Since a percolation transition can be characterized by critical exponents, a fundamental question can be raised: whether the percolation disintegration of city traffic during different traffic periods, such as rush hours and nonrush hours, belongs to the same or different universality classes
While previous studies have focused on effects of static network topology on critical exponents, the critical percolation behaviors of dynamic traffic network, to the best of our knowledge, have not been studied
Summary
Percolation transition is widely observed in networks ranging from biology to engineering. This has been further supported with good statistics (SI Appendix, Fig. S2) that the giant component during days off and workdays has different distribution at rush hours, raising the possibility of two percolation modes for traffic. For transportation systems, the highways during nonrush hours or days off play the role of effective long-range connections in the traffic network from a dynamic perspective.
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