A Real-Time Demand Management and Route-Guidance System for Eliminating Congestion

Traffic congestion is a problem that burdens urban cities daily. Despite the development of numerous research methodologies and technological solutions, the problem still persists. This article presents a system that combines traffic and demand management mechanisms to avoid the emergence of congestion by sustaining the occupancy of each road in the network up to a threshold, using a reservation scheme and keeping track of the future states of the network. Traffic management is responsible for navigating vehicles through congestion-free paths, while demand management is responsible for identifying the time when each vehicle will enter the network. Considering the size of actual urban networks and the number of vehicles utilizing the infrastructure, this is not an easy task. This work designs and validates a responsive and scalable real-life system for online traffic and demand management, while addressing the challenge of managing and processing large numbers of requests and data. The complexity and feasibility of the system are evaluated through microsimulations of real and artificial road networks. Its traffic efficiency is also evaluated by running extensive simulations of a real city, emulating realistic conditions in different scenarios.