In the study of complex networks (systems), the scaling phenomenon of flow fluctuations refers to a certain powerlaw between the mean flux (activity) of the i-th node and its variance σi as σi∝ α. Such scaling laws are found to be prevalent both in natural and man-made network systems, but the understanding of their origins still remains limited. This paper proposes a non-stationary Poisson process model to give an analytical explanation of the non-universal scaling phenomenon: the exponent α varies between 1/2 and 1 depending on the size of sampling time window and the relative strength of the external/internal driven forces of the systems. The crossover behaviour and the relation of fluctuation scaling with pseudo long range dependence are also accounted for by the model. Numerical experiments show that the proposed model can recover the multi-scaling phenomenon.
Modeling time headways between vehicles has attracted increasing interest in the traffic flow research field recently, because the corresponding statistics help to reveal the intrinsic interactions governing the vehicle dynamics. However, most previous micro-simulation models cannot yield the observed log-normal distributed headways. This paper designs a new car-following model inspired by the Galton board to reproduce the observed time-headway distributions as well as the complex traffic phenomena. The consistency between the empirical data and the simulation results indicates that this new car-following model provides a reasonable description of the car-following behaviours.
