Traffic network design by cellular automaton-based traffic simulator

Abstract

Braess pointed out that adding a new road to overcome a traffic congestion could cause a new traffic congestion leading to the reduction of the traffic flow in the whole traffic network, which is called Braess' paradox. The aim of this study is to formulate a traffic network design algorithm to increase the traffic flow in a traffic network. The objective function is the traffic flow of the whole traffic network and the route selection at the corners is considered as design variable. The traffic flow is estimated by a traffic flow simulator based on the cellular automaton model. A simple traffic network is considered as a numerical example. At different traffic densities, the traffic network is optimized to maximize the traffic flow. The results show that the optimized traffic network depends on traffic density. The situation presented by Braess' paradox could disappear at high traffic density.