Planning Brazilian Urban Traffic with a Geographic Application Software

Planning and optimizing urban traffic is a difficult problem, with considerable economic and social impacts. The development of suitable software tools to aid municipal governments to control and to improve the traffic flow is urgent due to the increasing number of vehicles in urban areas. However, the development of this kind of software represents a great challenge since the problems to be dealt with in this domain are both computationally and mathematically complex. This article presents a geographic application software as a feasible solution for this problem. The solution is geared towards Brazilian medium to large cities and is based on a mathematical model of the urban traffic. This model is stored in a geographic database and allows the user of the software (typically a traffic engineer) to search for alternative solutions for traffic problems. The software can provide optimal solutions for an important family of traffic problems, namely the Traffic Equilibrium Problem (TEP). This family involves the common hashing problems (e.g. traffic bottlenecks) as well as more sophisticated problems like vehicles’ pollution minimization. We have developed a prototype of the software and its solutions for the TEP were empirically validated against real traffic data from Goiânia, capital of the Brazilian state of Goiás.