Eur. Phys. J. B 76, 31-36 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2010-00169-3

Integrating fluctuations into distribution of resources in transportation networks

Department of Physics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200240, Shanghai, P.R. China

Corresponding author: ^a lisheng@sjtu.edu.cn

Received: 24 June 2009
Revised: 28 February 2010
Published online: 4 June 2010

Abstract

We propose a resource distribution strategy to reduce the average travel time in a transportation network under a given generation rate. Suppose that there are essential resources to avoid congestion in the network as well as some extra resources. The strategy distributes the essential resources by the average loads on the vertices and integrates the fluctuations of the instantaneous loads into the distribution of the extra resources. The fluctuations are calculated with the assumption of unlimited resources, where the calculation is incorporated into the calculation of the average loads without adding to the time complexity. Simulation results show that in scale-free networks, the fluctuation-integrated strategy provides shorter average travel time than a previous distribution strategy while keeping similar robustness; the benefit of our strategy is especially noticeable when the extra resources are scarce.