BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

Congestion emerges when high demand peaks put transportation systems under stress. Understanding the interplay between the spatial organization of demand, the route choices of citizens, and the underlying infrastructures is thus crucial to locate congestion hotspots and mitigate the delay. Here we develop a model where links are responsible for the processing of vehicles, that can be solved analytically before and after the onset of congestion, and providing insights into the global and local congestion. We apply our method to synthetic and real transportation networks, observing a strong agreement between the analytical solutions and the Monte Carlo simulations, and a reasonable agreement with the travel times observed in 12~cities under congested phase. Our framework can incorporate any type of routing extracted from real trajectory data to provide a more detailed description of congestion phenomena, and could be used to dynamically adapt the capacity of road segments according to the flow of vehicles, or reduce congestion through hotspot pricing.

Congestion emerges when high demand peaks put transportation systems under stress. Understanding the interplay between the spatial organization of demand, the route choices of citizens and the underlying infrastructures is thus crucial to locate congestion hotspots and mitigate the delay. Here we develop a model where links are responsible for the processing of vehicles, which can be solved analytically before and after the onset of congestion, and provide insights into the global and local congestion. We apply our method to synthetic and real transportation networks, observing a strong agreement between the analytical solutions and the Monte Carlo simulations, and a reasonable agreement with the travel times observed in 12 cities under congested phase. Our framework can incorporate any type of routing extracted from real trajectory data to provide a more detailed description of congestion phenomena, and could be used to dynamically adapt the capacity of road segments according to the flow of vehicles, or reduce congestion through hotspot pricing.© 2022 The Authors.

29 pages, 40 figures, Congestion emerges when high demand peaks put transportation systems under stress. Understanding the interplay between the spatial organization of demand, the route choices of citizens, and the underlying infrastructures is thus crucial to locate congestion hotspots and mitigate the delay. Here we develop a model where links are responsible for the processing of vehicles that can be solved analytically before and after the onset of congestion providing insights into the global and local congestion. We apply our method to synthetic and real transportation networks observing a strong agreement between the analytical solutions and the monte carlo simulations, and a reasonable agreement with the travel times observed in 12 cities under congested phase. Our framework can incorporate any type of routing extracted from real trajectory data to provide a more detailed description of congestion phenomena and could be used to dynamically adapt the capacity of road segments according to the flow of vehicles or reduce congestion through hotspot pricing., A.B. acknowledges financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under the Juan de la Cierva program (FJC2019-038958-I) and the Spanish Ministry of Universities, the European Union – Next Generation EU, the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan and the University of the Balearic Islands. We acknowledge support by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (PGC2018-094754-BC21, FIS2017-90782-REDT and RED2018-102518-T), Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR-896 and 2020PANDE00098), and Universitat Rovira i Virgili (2021PFR-URV-118). A.A. acknowledges also ICREA Academia and the James S. McDonnell Foundation (220020325)., Peer reviewed