Traffic dynamics on networks with competitive services

Abstract

Competitive services have large effects on traffic congestion. Based on the investigation on Chinese railway network, a competitive services model is proposed to capture traffic correlations between different services. According to the value of the weight parameter [Formula: see text], competitive services are grouped into assortative, disassortative and neutral ones, in which their traffic loads show strongly positive, weakly positive and non-significant correlations, respectively. Simulation results illustrate that our model can effectively capture the service correlations by adjusting the weight parameter. Using this model, we analyze the influence of different types of competitive services on network congestion. Our results indicate that both capacity and efficiency of network is the lowest when it supports assortative services.