Urban Traffic Bottleneck Identification Based on Congestion Propagation

Traffic congestion has seriously caused various problems in society, economy and environment, especially in urban areas. A traffic bottleneck is always seen as the root cause of congestion which frequently deduces the congestion emergence, queues formation and congestion propagation. However, bottlenecks are caused by many complicated factors and vary with spatial and temporal environment which are difficult to be defined and identified in urban areas. In this paper, we first propose a novel definition of bottlenecks in urban area based on the congestion propagation costs and the congestion weights of road segments. Then according to the definition, we present an urban bottleneck identification method using causal congestion trees and causal congestion graphs to identify some bottlenecks. This paper implements some experiments based on the urban inductive loop detector data. According to our proposed method, we identify several bottleneck groups around the urban area. Furthermore, we also improve the road capacity of identified bottlenecks and compare the congestion level and congestion propagation range before and after the improvement to verify the identified bottlenecks.