A quasi-contagion process modeling and characteristic analysis for real-world urban traffic network congestion patterns

The congestion propagation pattern in urban traffic networks has long been viewed as a complex question. Inspired by the fact that virus spread patterns are similar to traffic congestion propagation in some ways, this paper proposes a congestion propagation model (SIS-CP) to describe the congestion propagation patterns in large-scale traffic networks with very few parameters. In this SIS-CP model, the attribute of the real traffic network in the actual operation process is considered, a method based on Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT-based) is proposed to determine traffic states of links, and the congestion propagation patterns are analyzed. The real-world data of ‘DiDi Chuxing GAIA Open Dataset Initiative of Chengdu city from March to June is used to calibrate and validate the proposed models. The results show that the basic and limit value of congestion links’ ratio do exist in real traffic networks; the relationship between congestion links’ ratio and its derivative is conformed to the parabolic function; the HHT-based method can determine traffic states of links accurately; and the SIS-CP model can describe the congestion propagation patterns correctly.