Engineering traffic networks for more than one busy hour

A procedure is described that is used to engineer traffic networks for more than one hour of point-to-point load data. The procedure differs significantly from existing methods, which are based upon the concept of “economic load on the last trunk” (ECCS). (When the peak-load hours on most routes coincide, however, the procedure reduces to the ECCS method.) This “multihour” procedure has been implemented in a computer program used in design studies of three end offices in the Los Angeles local network. For the cases examined, the multihour technique produced networks whose costs averaged approximately 7 percent below those achieved with the presently used single-hour methods. Thus, the multihour technique appears to promise considerable cost benefits in future network designs.