Abstract
It is important to prevent occurrence of gridlock phenomenon because it may cause greatly decreasing the network capacity and rapidly expanding the traffic congestion to a large area. However, the mechanism which gives rise to gridlock phenomenon on urban street network is so complicated and still remains major challenge. The occurrence condition of gridlock phenomenon on a single grid network is investigated theoretically in this paper.
As a result, the occurrence of gridlock phenomenon on the single grid network is found to be controlled by both the merging ratio of the intersections constituting the grid network and the ratio of right-turning flow to the upstream link flow on the grid network. Furthermore, the traffic flow of the single grid network after the queue formed all around the network can be settled in the following three cases: (i) the traffic flow of the link which has the bottleneck does not become smaller than the bottleneck capacity C', (ii) the traffic flow of the link which has the bottleneck falls below the bottleneck capacity C', but it is settled in a value greater than zero and (iii) the traffic flow of the grid road network decreases and finally it approaches to zero.
