Decomposing the dynamics of heterogeneous delayed networks with applications to connected vehicle systems

Delay-coupled networks are investigated with nonidentical delay times and the effects of such heterogeneity on the emergent dynamics of complex systems are characterized. A simple decomposition method is presented that decouples the dynamics of the network into node-size modal equations in the vicinity of equilibria. The resulting independent components contain distributed delays that map the spatiotemporal complexity of the system to the time domain. We demonstrate that this approach can be used to reveal physical phenomena in heterogenous vehicular traffic when vehicles are linked via vehicle-to-vehicle communication.