Improving the throughput of transportation networks with a time-optimization routing strategy

Traffic congestion, a common and complicated phenomenon in urban transportation systems, is attracting increasing attention from researchers in Geographical Information Science (GIS) and other fields. In this study, we illustrate a general mechanism that reveals the relationship between travel time and dynamic traffic conditions. We measure a vehicle’s travel time to its destination along any path, where the travel time is calculated based on the path length and on the real-time traffic volume and transport capacity of each road segment on the path. On the basis of this measurement, we present a simple dynamic routing strategy that allows each vehicle to dynamically choose the path to its destination while imposing the minimum travel time. The application of our routing algorithm to the Chengdu street network, Barabási–Albert scale-free network and Erdös–Rényi random network shows that the proposed strategy remarkably improves network throughput and balances traffic load distribution. Our findings suggest that mining the time mechanism of network transport is important to explore efficient time-optimization routing algorithms to enhance the transport capacity of urban street networks and other kinds of networks.