Velocity control for improving flow through a bottleneck

Abstract

A bottleneck can largely deteriorate the flow, such as a traffic light or an on-ramp at a road. To alleviate bottleneck situations, one of the important strategies is to control input rate to suit the state of the road. In this study, we propose an effective velocity control of traveling particles, in which the particle velocity depends on the state of a bottleneck. To analyze our method, we modify the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) and introduce a slow-to-start rule, which we refer to as controlled TASEP in the present paper. Flow improvement is verified in numerical simulations and theoretical analyses by using controlled TASEP.