The effects of redundancy and information manipulation on traffic networks

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1558935 (Table of Contents)

Traffic congestion is one of the most frequently encountered problems in real life. It is not only a scientific concern of scholars, but also an inevitable issue for most of the individuals living in urban areas. Since every driver in traffic networks tries to minimize own journey length, and volume of the traffic prevents coordination between individuals, a cooperative behavior will not be provided spontaneously in order to decrease the total cost of the network and the time spent on traffic jams. In order to perceive the effects of cooperative behavior, we develop an agent based traffic application, in which adaptive agents are able to receive traffic information and have different path selection strategies, in order to decrease own journey lengths. We lead them to a cooperative behavior by manipulating the traffic information they receive. Also, by constructing a redundant road to the network, we conceive the importance of the adaptivity to varying information. Moreover, we analyze network topologies of Scale Free, Random, and Small World networks to evaluate the compatibility as traffic networks. Then we try to create fair traffic networks from the network topologies above, in which the selfish behaviors of non adaptive drivers causes less congestion and total journey lengths, by road closures. By doing these experiments an analyses, we obtain a deeper perception about the importance of adaptivity, information retrieval, topology, and redundancy for traffic networks.