"Are there common phenomena and laws in the dynamic behavior of granular materials, traffic, and socio-economic systems?" The answers given at the international workshop "Traffic and Granular Flow '99" are presented in this volume. From a physical standpoint, all these systems can be treated as (self)-driven many-particle systems with strong fluctuations, showing multistability, phase transitions, non-linear waves, etc. The great interest in these systems is due to several unexpected new discoveries and their practical relevance for solving some fundamental problems of today's societies. This includes intelligent measures for traffic flow optimization and methods from "econophysics" for stabilizing (stock) markets.

Product Description: During the last decade physicists, engineers and computer scientists have joined in an enormously fruitful dialogue about traffic and granular flow. Cars and sand grains have in common, that they interact irreversibly, which is the reason for similar jamming phenomena...read more

Product Description: This book again continues the biannual series of (now six) conference proceedings, which has become a classical reference in traffic and granular research alike. It addresses new developments at the borderline between physics, engineering and computational science...read more

Product Description: These proceedings are the fifth in the series Traffic and Granular Flow, and we hope they will be as useful a reference as their predecessors. Both the realistic modelling of granular media and traffic flow present important challenges at the borderline between physics and engineering, and enormous progress has been made since 1995, when this series started...read more

Product Description: Can one obtain new insights by comparing the motion of bacteria or plancton striving for food and light with that of pedestrians in a crowded street? Do complex transport networks behave similarly under high load, be it the internet or downtown city traffic? These and related questions were topics of the international workshop on Traffic and Granular Flow '97, which took place in Duisburg, 6-8 October, 1997 (as part of the 25th anniversary of the Gerhard-Mercator-Universität, Duisburg)...read more