Road traffic control based on genetic algorithm for reducing traffic congestion

In this paper, we propose a road traffic control method for reducing traffic congestion with a genetic algorithm. In the not too distant future, a system which controls the routes of all vehicles in a certain area must be realized. The system should optimize the routes of all vehicles, but the solution space of this problem is enormous. Therefore, we apply the genetic algorithm to this problem by encoding the route of all vehicles to a fixed length chromosome. To improve the search performance, a new genetic operator called path shortening is also designed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown experimentally. (C) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 95(4): 11-19, 2012; Published online in Wiley Online Library . DOI 10.1002/ecj.10421