According to a study in the New Journal of Physics, traffic jams develop spontaneously when vehicle density exceeds a critical level, beyond which minor fluctuations in the
flow of individual vehicles destabilize the whole thing.
The software works by modelling the
action of individual vehicles, each of which belongs to one of 14 types (such as cars, trucks and buses) with 330 different origins and destinations.
Such inputs could potentially be used to create a specific time - based trajectory of optimized powertrain control references to minimize the fuel or energy
consumption of each individual vehicle across some finite future time horizon.
A shift from petroleum - based vehicles to electricity - based ones would move the locus for addressing carbon emissions from
millions of individual vehicles to far fewer centralized electricity - generating plants.