COMPARATIVE EVALUATION OF TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES USING SIMULATION

The growth in automobile traffic worldwide has led to serious congestion problems in many cities, resulting in unproductive, wasteful delays for both motorists and commercial vehicles. The addition of road capacity cannot address the rate of growth in traffic alone and hence, there is a need for better traffic management strategies (TMS) to be implemented. Various alternate strategies must be evaluated before the best solution can be obtained, and traffic simulation has proven to be a very useful tool in this process. This paper investigates various concepts involved in traffic simulation and subsequent applications in comparative evaluation of TMS. As a case study, it was applied to a European city and traffic simulation proved to be a very useful tool for evaluating lane additions/deletions and also efficacy of control systems such as variable speed limit signs. Such a concept may also be extended to cities of developing countries and in this regard, proposals were made for Mumbai city in India.