The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process on networks

Abstract: We study the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) on complex networks, as a paradigmatic model for transport subject to excluded volume interactions. Building on TASEP phenomenology on a single segment and borrowing ideas from random networks we investigate the effect of connectivity on transport. In particular, we argue that the presence of disorder in the topology of vertices crucially modifies the transport features of a network: irregular networks involve homogeneous segments and have a bimodal distribution of edge densities, whereas regular networks are dominated by shocks leading to a unimodal density distribution. The proposed numerical approach of solving for mean-field transport on networks provides a general framework for studying TASEP on large networks, and is expected to generalize to other transport processes.