The University of Sheffield
Department of Computer Science

Richard Wilkinson Undergraduate Dissertation 2005/06

"Dynamic routing of traffic in a simulated system;"

Supervised by Dr GA Manson

Abstract

The problem of traffic congestion is an increasingly serious one. It is also a problem where there aren't any concrete methods on how to solve it. It is not possible to simply build more roads as this is expensive and space is often at a premium in the places where congestion arises. Limiting the number of vehicles on the roads can work but at present the only method of doing this is by congestion charging which proves unpopular with the public. This project carries on from work done in previous years. First tools which will aid the development of a new dynamic routing algorithm, including a traffic network generator and improvements are created. Then a new routing algorithm is created and tested. The routing algorithm created did not show improvement over a static routing method, however the extremely slow runtime of simulations of large traffic networks caused the focus of the project move onto distributing the system over a cluster of computers in order to improve the runtime of a simulation. At the end of this project a good base of both knowledge and program code has been built up allowing future researchers to carry on with the work and produce a working distributed system and carry on with the problem of dynamic routing.;