Rapid urban growth is resulting in an increase in travel demand and private vehicle ownership in urban areas. In the present
scenario, the existing infrastructure fails to match the demand which leads to traffic congestion and consequently, vehicular
pollution. This project focuses on two important problems arising in transportation network research.
First, we will investigate the dynamic traffic assignment problem, which involves determining the distribution of traffic flow
on a network. The benefits of developing models and methods for this problem are two-fold. On the one hand, they produce
immediate practical results (decision-making support in transportation, in-vehicle routing guide systems, planning system,
etc…). On the other hand, they lead to new techniques and approaches for coping with different nonlinear optimization
problems.
Solving the Traffic Assignment Problem is an important tool for the design of transport networks because its solution predicts
levels of congestion for different variations of the network. The issue of network planning is known as the Road Network
Design Problem and is the second problem that will be studied in this project. We will generalize the existing problem into a
Road Network Optimization Problem where all types of modifications, e.g. additions and deletions of network elements, are
considered. This has been proven in practice to be beneficial in mitigating the congestion issue.