Alleviating Urban Traffic Congestion by Means of Adaptive Routing

Traffic congestion is an important problem of today's urban life. Various approaches have been analyzed for solving this problem, most solutions addressing only a specific cause of the congestion. This paper focuses on rush hour congestion and aims to address its cause, the fact that many drivers need to reach the same destination and use the same routes, most frequently the shortest ones. A simple solution would be a collaborative behavior from the drivers, so as to ensure that some of the drivers choose slightly longer routes in order to avoid congestion. This paper aims to investigate the improvement potential of using intelligent routing, while offering (as much as possible) the fastest available routes to the drivers. A simple yet effective routing algorithm is proposed and tested by means of a multi-agent system on top of a traffic simulator. Experimental results conform to the expected behavior of the algorithm and are meant to provide reference values for further research.