Multibunch solutions of the differential-difference equation for traffic flow

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Abstract
The Newell-Whitham type of car-following model, with a hyperbolic tangent as the optimal velocity function, has a finite number of exact steady traveling wave solutions that can be expressed in terms of elliptic theta functions. Each such solution describes a density wave with a definite number of car bunches on a circuit. In our numerical simulations, we observe a transition process from uniform flow to congested flow described by a one-bunch analytic solution, which appears to be an attractor of the system. In this process, the system exhibits a series of transitions through which it comes to assume configurations closely approximating multibunch solutions with successively fewer bunches.
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