Citation

Zeng G, Li D, Guo S, Gao L, Gao Z, Stanley HE, Havlin S. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2019; 116(1): 23-28.

Affiliation

Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan 52900, Israel.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1801545116

PMID

30591562

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.

Copyright © 2018 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.

Language: en

Keywords

critical exponents; percolation; phase transition; switch; traffic