Study on Urban Road Network Capacity Based on Self-organized Criticality

With the rapid growth of the socioeconomic, urban traffic congestion has become acute. In this paper, we studied the internal mechanism of congestion by analyzing the road network capacity, and conducted a qualitative and quantitative research on road network capacity of Beijing. By applying the theory of self-organized criticality, we analyzed the running status data and traffic congestion index of the road network of Beijing from 2008 to 2012, concluding that the road network of Beijing has the power-law characteristics under the relevant scale, following this, the concept of road network capacity based on self-organized criticality has been proposed. Moreover, we established a calculating model of road network capacity based on sandpile model and the theory of cellular automata, simultaneously made a simulation experiment of sandpile model for a specific road network of Beijing. The obtained results show that our model can be applied as an effective approach to calculate the capacity of road network.