Intelligent traffic control decision support system

Abstract

When non-recurrent road traffic congestion happens, the operator of the traffic control centre has to select the most appropriate traffic control measure or combination of measures in a short time to manage the traffic network. This is a complex task, which requires expert knowledge, much experience and fast reaction. There are a large number of factors related to a traffic state as well as a large number of possible control measures that need to be considered during the decision making process. The identification of suitable control measures for a given non-recurrent traffic congestion can be tough even for experienced operators. Therefore, simulation models are used in many cases. However, simulating different traffic scenarios for a number of control measures in a complicated situation is very time-consuming. In this paper we propose an intelligent traffic control decision support system (ITC-DSS) to assist the human operator of the traffic control centre to manage online the current traffic state. The proposed system combines three soft-computing approaches, namely fuzzy logic, neural network, and genetic algorithm. These approaches form a fuzzy-neural network tool with self-organization algorithm for initializing the membership functions, a GA algorithm for identifying fuzzy rules, and the back-propagation neural network algorithm for fine tuning the system parameters. The proposed system has been tested for a case-study of a small section of the ring-road around Riyadh city. The results obtained for the case study are promising and show that the proposed approach can provide an effective support for online traffic control.