Network Centrality Assessment (NCA): A Strategic Planning and Investment Tool to Simulate Traffic Volume in Developing Countries

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.