arXiv subjects

Ziyou Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Ziyou Gao.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Go left or right? Explore the side preference behavior with circle antipode experiments

Side preference is a critical behavior in conflict handling, and here the behavior is investigated with pedestrian trajectories in circle antipode experiments that own both conflicting and symmetrical participant situations. In the series of experiments, more participants(around 70\%) prefer to walk on the right side, and the statistical analyses reveal that factors such as handedness, gender, and height have no significant impacts. Further investigations show that most pedestrians actually make the side choices at the very beginning, and empirical results suggest that selecting the dominate side preference (right side in our experiments) can benefit the individual movement efficiency. To reflect the realistic side preference characteristics in simulations, a Voronoi diagram based model is introduced as well as a side preference parameter with normal distribution is formulated and calibrated. Further simulations prove that the modified model is able to reproduce realistic side preference behaviors in circle antipode experiments and other common situations.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

Car following behavioral stochasticity analysis and modelling: Perspective from wave travel time

This paper analyzes the car following behavioral stochasticity based on two sets of field experimental trajectory data by measuring the wave travel time series of vehicle n. The analysis shows that (i) No matter the speed of leading vehicle oscillates significantly or slightly, wave travel time might change significantly; (ii) A follower's wave travel time can vary from run to run even the leader travels at the same stable speed; (iii) Sometimes, even if the leader speed fluctuates significantly, the follower can keep a nearly constant value of wave travel time. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller test indicates that the time series the changing rate of wave travel time follows a mean reversion process, no matter the oscillations fully developed or not. Based on the finding, a simple stochastic Newell model is proposed. The concave growth pattern of traffic oscillations has been derived analytically. Furthermore, simulation results demonstrate that the new model well captures both macroscopic characteristic of traffic flow evolution and microscopic characteristic of car following.

nlin.AO↗

arXiv2019

Switch between critical percolation modes in city traffic dynamics

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.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2018

Speed dependent stochasticity capacitates Newell model for synchronized flow and oscillation growth pattern

This paper has incorporated the stochasticity into the Newell car following model. Three stochastic driving factors have been considered: (i) Driver's acceleration is bounded. (ii) Driver's deceleration includes stochastic component, which is depicted by a deceleration with the randomization probability that is assumed to increase with the speed. (iii) Vehicles in the jam state have a larger randomization probability. Two simulation scenarios are conducted to test the model. In the first scenario, traffic flow on a circular road is investigated. In the second scenario, empirical traffic flow patterns in the NGSIM data induced by a rubberneck bottleneck is studied, and the simulated traffic oscillations and synchronized traffic flow are consistent with the empirical patterns. Moreover, two experiments of model calibration and validation are conducted. The first is to calibrate and validate using experimental data, which illustrates that the concave growth pattern has been quantitatively simulated. The second is to calibrate and cross validate vehicles' trajectories using NGSIM data, which exhibits that the car following behaviors of single vehicles can be well described. Therefore, our study highlights the importance of speed dependent stochasticity in traffic flow modeling, which cannot be ignored as in most car-following studies.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2018

Theoretical investigation, simulation and empirical analysis of the growth pattern of traffic oscillations in the Euler coordinates

The formation and development of oscillations is an important traffic flow phenomenon. Recent studies found that along a vehicle platoon described in the Lagrangian specification, traffic oscillations grow in a concave way. Since stationary bottlenecks are more intuitively described in the Eulerian framework, this paper investigates whether the concave growth pattern of traffic oscillations in the Lagrangian coordinates can be transferred to the Euler coordinates (i.e. the concave increase in standard deviation is no longer measured across the vehicle indices but as a function of the road location). To this end, we theoretically unify these two ways of measuring oscillations by revealing their mapping relationship. We show that the growth pattern measured in the Lagrangian coordinates can be transferred to the Euler coordinates. We believe this finding is nontrivial since the scenarios are significantly different: while in vehicle platoons (Lagrangian view, non-penetrable moving bottleneck), the speed variance for a given vehicle is ideally constant, the drivers in the Eulerian setting (penetrable stationary bottleneck triggering the waves) experience all amplitudes, first the big ones and then the small ones. To test this proposition, we performed simulation using two different kinds of car-following models. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis. Finally, we performed empirical analysis using the NGSIM data, which also validates the theoretical analysis.

nlin.PS↗

arXiv2018

Investigation of Pedestrian Dynamics in Circle Antipode Experiments

To explore the pedestrian motion navigation and conflict reaction mechanisms in practice, we organized a series of circle antipode experiments. In the experiments, pedestrians are uniformly initialized on the circle and required to leave for their antipodal positions simultaneously. On the one hand, a conflicting area is naturally formulated in the central region due to the converged shortest routes, so the practical conflict avoidance behaviors can be fully explored. On the other hand, the symmetric experimental conditions of pedestrians, e.g., symmetric starting points, symmetric destination points, and symmetric surroundings lay the foundation for further quantitative comparisons among participants. The pedestrian trajectories in the experiments are recognized and rotated, and several aspects, e.g., the trajectory space distribution, route length, travel time, velocity distribution, and time-series, are investigated. It is found that: (1) Pedestrians prefer the right-hand side during the experiments; (2) The route length is as the law of log-normal distribution, the route potential obeys the exponential distribution, and the travel time is normally distributed as well as the speed; (3) Taking the short routes unexpectedly cost pedestrians plenty of travel time, while detour seems to be a time-saving decision. What's more, the series of experiments can be regarded as a basis of the model evaluation benefit from the serious conflicts and the symmetric conditions. The evaluation framework contains four distribution indexes and two time series indexes in space and time dimensions, and they are respectively graded A traditional social force model and a Voronoi diagram based modification are introduced to test the evaluation framework. The evaluation results show that the framework is beneficial to evaluate pedestrian models and even reflects the minor differences between the models.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2018

Spatial social networks identified from urban group travel

While the individual travel implicates the trace of individual mobility decision, group travels signify the possible social relationship behind these traces. Different from online social network, spatial interaction between individuals is a critical yet unknown dimension to understand the collective behaviors in a city. In this paper, based on over 127 million trips in Beijing metro network, we develop a method to distinguish the group travel of friends from the encounter travel of familiar strangers. We find travels of friends are among the most predictable groups. These identified friendships are interwoven and form a friendship network, with structural properties different from encounter network. The topological role of individuals in this network is found strongly correlated with her travel predictability. The overall time savings of about 34190 minutes after redistribution of inefficient group traveler with flexible travel purposes shows the potential of designing specific traffic fares for group travel. Our identification and understanding of group travel may help to develop and organize new traffic mode in the future smart transportation.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2018

Investigation of Voronoi diagram based Direction Choices Using Uni- and Bi-directional Trajectory Data

In a crowd, individuals make different motion choices such as "moving to destination", "following another pedestrian", and "making a detour". For the sake of convenience, the three direction choices are respectively called destination direction, following direction and detour direction in this paper. Here, it is found that the featured direction choices could be inspired by the shape characteristics of Voronoi diagram. To be specific, in the Voronoi cell of a pedestrian, the direction to a Voronoi node is regarded as a potential "detour" direction, and the direction perpendicular to a Voronoi link is regarded as a potential "following" direction. A pedestrian generally owns several alternative Voronoi nodes and Voronoi links in a Voronoi cell, and the optimal detour and following direction are determined by considering related factors such as deviation. Plus the destination direction which is directly pointing to the destination, the three basic direction choices are defined in a Voronoi cell. In order to evaluate the Voronoi diagram based basic directions, the empirical trajectory data in both uni- and bi-directional flow experiments are extracted. A time series method considering the step frequency is used to reduce the original trajectories' swaying phenomena which might disturb the recognition of actual forward direction. The deviations between the empirical velocity direction and the basic directions are investigated, and each velocity direction is classified into a basic direction or regarded as an inexplicable direction according to the deviations. The analysis results show that each basic direction could be a potential direction choice for a pedestrian. The combination of the three basic directions could cover most empirical velocity direction choices in both uni- and bi-directional flow experiments.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2016

Empirical analysis and simulation of the evolution concavity of traffic oscillations

This paper has investigated the growth pattern of traffic oscillations in the NGSIM vehicle trajectories data, via measuring the standard deviation of vehicle velocity involved in oscillations. We found that the standard deviation of the velocity increases in a concave way along vehicles in the oscillations. Moreover, all datasets collapse into a single concave curve, which indicates a universal evolution law of oscillations. A comparison with traffic experiment shows that the empirical and the experimental results are highly compatible and can be fitted by a single concave curve, which demonstrates that qualitatively the growth pattern of oscillations is not affected by type of bottleneck and lane changing behavior. We have shown theoretically that small disturbances increase in a convex way in the initial stage in the traditional models presuming a unique relationship between speed and density, which obviously deviates from our findings. Simulations show that stochastic models in which the traffic state dynamically spans a 2D region in the speed-spacing plane can qualitatively or even quantitatively reproduce the concave growth pattern of traffic oscillations.

nlin.CG↗

arXiv2014

Quantifying Information Flow During Emergencies

Recent advances on human dynamics have focused on the normal patterns of human activities, with the quantitative understanding of human behavior under extreme events remaining a crucial missing chapter. This has a wide array of potential applications, ranging from emergency response and detection to traffic control and management. Previous studies have shown that human communications are both temporally and spatially localized following the onset of emergencies, indicating that social propagation is a primary means to propagate situational awareness. We study real anomalous events using country-wide mobile phone data, finding that information flow during emergencies is dominated by repeated communications. We further demonstrate that the observed communication patterns cannot be explained by inherent reciprocity in social networks, and are universal across different demographics.

physics.soc-ph↗