Abstract:
Urban areas in most of the developing countries, particularly in South Asia, have faced major
challenges in traffic management and control in recent decades. Cities in those countries have
recently been witnessed a rapid economic growth and urban sprawl, resulting an accelerated
increase of vehicle movements which create several problems such as traffic congestion, road
accidents and air pollutions. Therefore, it is important to formulate urban transport strategies
and identify strategic transportation infrastructure projects for investment, before reaching the
critical situation (Nishimiya, Koizumi, & Shimada, 2012). However, most of the transport
planning efforts in developing countries have been based on the conventional transport
planning process (Hamad & Faghri, 2003) which is difficult to be adopted for forecasting
traffic in developing countries (Jayasinghe, Sano, & Nishiuchi, 2015). The difficulties of
adopting conventional multi-step modeling in developing countries includes inadequate
database for planning especially on land-uses, inadequate technical expertise in local level
planning and implementing agencies, lack of funds to collect data and use sophisticated
software applications, etc. (Paul, 2009), (TRL report cited in Cairns, 2011), (Hamad, Faghri,
& Li, 2015).
We have developed a new method based on graph theory and centrality to simulate
traffic volume, which can effectively works to overcome the above-mentioned difficulties.
Accordingly, this paper introduces the developed method, i.e. ‘Network Centrality
Assessment’-NCA, and application possibilities based on five case studies in selected Sri
Lankan and Indian cities.
