Korrelationen und deren Dynamik in Autobahnnetzen

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Karl Thomas Guhr; Professor Dr. Michael Schreckenberg
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Verkehrs- und Transportsysteme, Intelligenter und automatisierter Verkehr
• Förderung: Förderung von 2019 bis 2023
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 418382724

• Erstellungsjahr: 2023

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

The goal of this project was to carry out a large-scale statistical analysis of traffic data, consisting of velocities and flows of all vehicles on the freeways or motorways in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany. The data are collected by the government agency Strassen.NRW, Prof. Schreckenberg has direct access to these data. Prof. Guhr’s group has developed new methods to analyze correlation structures in data of financial markets. The transfer to traffic was promising. We decided to join forces and combined expertises to perform a thorough analysis of the non-stationary, i.e. varying, correlation structures in the NRW motorway traffic. Two young researchers were funded by the project: Dr. Shanshan Wang, postdoc of Prof. Guhr, and MSc Sebastian Gartzke, PhD student of Prof. Schreckenberg. The communication was greatly facilitated as the offices of our groups are located in the immediate vicinity on two floors of the same building. We met regularly once a week at a fixed time to discuss new results and the next steps, further informal meetings and discussions took place very often. In the beginning, Dr. Wang and Prof. Guhr had to learn much from Prof. Schreckenberg and MSc Gartzke about the data, their storage, the accessibility, data processing, interpretation of faulty data, etc. Then, Prof. Schreckenberg and MSc Gartzke learned from Dr. Wang and Prof. Guhr about the details of the new statistical methods developed in finance. After about half a year we were on an equal footing in all mentioned aspects. This was very important for the success of the project. We are pleased to report that there was and is considerable interest also by younger ´ students. Prof. Guhr had the four BSc students Rene Pilarczyk, Gabor Hollbeck, Oskar Buyken and Michael Böhmer who worked on certain aspects that arose during our project work. They also participated in our regular meetings during their BSc work. The work atmosphere was always very lively, communicative, supportive and positive, and thus an important ingredient for the success of the project. Comparing the list of objectives in the proposal, we think we may say that we successfully pursued them. We have plenty of new results along the lines of the proposal. In Sec. 3, we will present in more detail the works done over the time of the project. There are already the six published papers [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], and two more in preparation, see Secs. 3.8 and 3.9, both close to submission. The proposed studies of the multivariate distributions and the copulae are in progress, see Sec. 5. As first step for the empirical aspects, the copula data analysis was tackled by the BSc student Oskar Buyken. We are proud of all the new results we have, and also of the new studies they triggered. Our collaboration was extraordinarily fruitful. We are convinced that this project was a real success.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

• Quasi-stationary states in temporal correlations for traffic systems: Cologne orbital motorway as an example. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2020(10), 103404.
  Wang, Shanshan; Gartzke, Sebastian; Schreckenberg, Michael & Guhr, Thomas
  
• Collective behavior in the North Rhine-Westphalia motorway network. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2021(12), 123401.
  Wang, Shanshan; Gartzke, Sebastian; Schreckenberg, Michael & Guhr, Thomas
  
• Exact multivariate amplitude distributions for non-stationary Gaussian or algebraic fluctuations of covariances or correlations. Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical, 54(12), 125002.
  Guhr, Thomas & Schell, Andreas
  
• Erratum: Collective behavior in the North Rhine-Westphalia motorway network (2021 J. Stat. Mech. 123401). Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2022(9), 099901.
  Wang, Shanshan; Gartzke, Sebastian; Schreckenberg, Michael & Guhr, Thomas
  
• Identifying subdominant collective effects in a large motorway network. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2022(11), 113402.
  Wang, Shanshan; Schreckenberg, Michael & Guhr, Thomas
  
• Spatial correlation analysis of traffic flow on parallel motorways in Germany. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 599, 127367.
  Gartzke, Sebastian; Wang, Shanshan; Guhr, Thomas & Schreckenberg, Michael
  
• Response functions as a new concept to study local dynamics in traffic networks. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 626, 129116.
  Wang, Shanshan; Schreckenberg, Michael & Guhr, Thomas
  
• Transitions between quasi-stationary states in traffic systems: Cologne orbital motorways as an example. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2023(9), 093401.
  Wang, Shanshan; Schreckenberg, Michael & Guhr, Thomas