Dissolution of traffic jam via additional local interactions

We use a cellular automata approach to numerically investigate traffic flow patterns on a single lane. The free-flow phase (F), the synchronized phase (S), and the jam phase (J) are observed and the transitions among them are studied as the vehicular density ρ is slowly varied. If ρ is decreased from well inside the J phase, the flux Φ follows the lower branch of the hysteresis loop, implying that the adiabatic decrease of ρ is not an efficient way to put the system back into S or F phases. We propose a simple way to help the system to escape out of J phase, which is based on the local information of the velocities of downstream vehicles.