Traffic disruption and recovery in road networks

• Domain wall model used to explain disruption and recovery processes in road networks.
• Both one-dimensional systems and two-dimensional networks studied.
• Domain wall model includes interactions of multiple walls during recovery.
• Domain wall predictions in good agreement with cellular automata simulations.

We study the impact of disruptions on road networks, and the recovery process after the disruption is removed from the system. Such disruptions could be caused by vehicle breakdown or illegal parking. We analyze the transient behavior using domain wall theory, and compare these predictions with simulations of a stochastic cellular automaton model. We find that the domain wall model can reproduce the time evolution of flow and density during the disruption and the recovery processes, for both one-dimensional systems and two-dimensional networks.