City Traffic: Researchers Mapped Evolution Of Bus Operation In Ideal Conditions

Ever tire of the maze that is city traffic?

In recent findings published in the journal Chaos, researchers in Colombia and Chile mapped the exact evolution of a bus operating under ideal city conditions.

For the study, they built a rather simple model of a bus that interacts with traffic lights and stops at a bus stop to pick up passengers between them. "We use it to explore under which conditions the interaction with traffic lights is chaotic or not. And to do this, we change the way the traffic lights change from red to green," said Jorge Villalobos, the paper's lead author and the dean of the faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the Universidad de Ibagué in Colombia, in a news release.

The "Lypunov exponent" can then be used as a number that's used to characterize chaos in a dynamical system, according to researchers.  "If this number is positive, we have a chaotic system with low predictability," explained Villalobos. "We identify the combination of parameters-basically the way the traffic lights behave-for which we encounter positive Lyapunov exponents to identify situations for which the traffic lights make the bus trajectory chaotic and unpredictable in time or not."

The study findings are rather preliminary as just one vehicle was studied. "The biggest implication is that we show that chaos is an inherent part of city vehicle dynamics," noted Villalobos.

However, in their next steps, researchers are looking to examine different types of driving behaviors, including breaking slowing vs. aggressively, etc., and how these might affect traffic chaos.

"We're working toward different ways of measuring our results in physical systems -- scaled or real systems -- and also exploring new models so that we can observe interactions between vehicles," he concluded.

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