RoadRank

With the rapidly growing population in urban areas, these days the urban road networks are expanding at a faster rate. The frequent movement of people on them leads to traffic congestions. These congestions originate from some crowded road segments, and diffuse towards other parts of the urban road networks creating further congestions. This behavior of road networks motivates the need to understand the influence of individual road segments on others in terms of congestion. In this work, we propose RoadRank, an algorithm to compute the influence scores of each road segment in an urban road network, and rank them based on their overall influence. It is an incremental algorithm that keeps on updating the influence scores with time, by feeding with the latest traffic data at each time point. The method starts with constructing a directed graph called influence graph, which is then used to iteratively compute the influence scores using probabilistic diffusion theory. We show promising preliminary experimental results on real SCATS traffic data of Melbourne