Fuzzy peak hour for urban road traffic network

Traffic congestion is now nearly ubiquitous in many urban areas and frequently occurs during rush hour periods. Rush hour avoidance is an effective way to ease traffic congestion. It is significant to calculate the rush hour for alleviating traffic congestion. This paper provides a method to calculate the fuzzy peak hour of the urban traffic network considering the flow, speed and occupancy. The process of calculation is based on betweenness centrality of network theory, optimal separation method, time period weighting, probability-possibility transformations and trapezoidal approximations of fuzzy numbers. The fuzzy peak hour of the urban road traffic network (URTN) is a trapezoidal fuzzy number [m(1), m(2), m(3), m(4)]. It helps us (i) to confirm a more detailed traffic condition at each moment, (ii) to distinguish the five traffic states of the traffic network in one day, (iii) to analyze the characteristic of appearance and disappearance processes of the each traffic state and (iv) to find out the time pattern of residents travel in one city.