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AGSOE: Arbeitsgruppe Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

AGSOE 14: Poster Session

AGSOE 14.7: Poster

Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 18:10–20:00, P1B

Synchronization in material flow networks with biologically inspired self-organized control — •Reik Donner¹, Stefan Lämmer¹, and Dirk Helbing² — ¹TU Dresden, Andreas-Schubert-Str. 23, 01062 Dresden, Germany — ²ETH Zürich, Universitätstr. 41, CH-8092 Zürich

The efficient operation of material flows in traffic or production networks is a subject of broad economic interest. Traditional centralized as well as decentralized approaches to operating material flow networks are known to have severe disadvantages. As an alternative approach that may help to overcome these problems, we propose a simple self-organization mechanism of conflicting flows that is inspired by oscillatory phenomena of pedestrian or animal counter-flows at bottlenecks. As a result, one may observe a synchronization of the switching dynamics at different intersections in the network. For regular grid topologies, we find different synchronization regimes depending on the inertia of the switching from one service state to the next one.

In order to test the robustness of our corresponding observations, we study how the detailed properties of the network as well as dynamic feedbacks between the relevant state variables affect the degree of achievable synchronization and the resulting performance of the network. Our results yield an improved understanding of the conditions that have to be present for efficiently operating material flow networks by a decentralized control, which is of paramount importance for future implementations in real-world traffic or production systems.