Determination of the critical congestion point in urban traffic networks: A case study

At present, most of the attempts to quantify urban traffic flow have completely ignored its predominant social footprint, while literature concerning the appearance and forecasting of congestion points remains scarce. This paper presents a methodology for determining the critical point leading to congestion in urban traffic, based on analyzing the network topology and flow using an innovative mixture of complex network metrics and state of the art traffic simulation. To validate the concepts and methodology we conducted a case study over the city of Timisoara. At around 0.5 million inhabitants we believe it provides, which provides a suitable benchmark for deriving empirical, results and qualitative interpretations.