Phase Diagram of Traffic States in the Presence of Inhomogeneities

Dirk Helbing, Ansgar Hennecke, Martin Treiber

Published 1998-09-24, updated 1999-05-27Version 2

We present a phase diagram of the different kinds of congested traffic that are triggered by disturbances when passing ramps or other spatial inhomogeneities of a freeway. The simulation results obtained by the nonlocal, gas-kinetic-based traffic model are in good agreement with empirical findigs. They allow to understand the observed trasitions between free and various kinds of congested traffic, among them localized clusters, stop-and-go waves, and different types of ``synchronized'' traffic. The proposed conditions for the existence of these states suggest that the phase diagram is universal for a class of different microscopic and macroscopic traffic models.