An Innovative Hybrid Biologically Inspired Method for Traffic Optimization Problem

The transport network and road services are the foundation for the development of human civilization. It is immensely essential to manage network congestion as well as to minimize the travel time of the growing traffic load on the road network. Traffic signals may play an important role in managing the mounting traffic. This work relies on reducing the total time lag at the traffic signals, thus reducing the overall travel period. The model is designed on a bi-level framework. The overall wait time is optimized at the traffic signals by the upper level while the User Equilibrium (UE) is estimated by the lower level. Biologically inspired metaheuristic methods like Bat Algorithm (BA), Genetic algorithms (GA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), and many others demonstrated optimized outcomes for bi-level problems. To improve the desirability of the metaheuristic techniques an innovative method encapsulating the desirability of both BA and GA is proposed to evaluate the traffic optimization problem (TOP). While BA helps in faster convergence GA diversifies the search space. A comparative analysis has been carried out with the parent algorithms as well as an existing ACO-GA-based model. It was observed that the proposed BA-GA method performs better than the rest of the techniques.