A supporting tool for efficient city traffic planning

Heavily congested roads in city areas are a common problem today. Several attempts to solve this problem by improving road infrastructure or imposing restrictions on motor vehicles entering city areas are not feasible, especially in developing countries like Sri Lanka. This may be due to lack of funds to improve the infrastructure, the objections of the general public on applying restrictions on the inflow of vehicles or difficulties on acquiring lands to construct roads in highly populated areas. Therefore it is important to have a different method to handle traffic congestions. A methodology of handling city traffic in a very efficient way by proper traffic management instead of modifying the road infrastructure is presented in this paper. This is achieved by rearranging the traffic flow in such a way that the interruption to the continuous traffic flow is minimized. A tool was developed using Flow Control Mechanisms, Genetic Algorithms and Graph Theory in order to dynamically suggest improved traffic plans.