Basic Study on Expressway Congestion Mitigation using Cellular Automata

Abstract

Traffic congestion has become a serious social problem in Japan. In particular, traffic congestion causes enormous time and economic losses on expressways, which are intended to facilitate smooth traffic flow. It also causes environmental problems and a decrease in logistics efficiency, so efforts to eliminate or reduce traffic congestion are essential. The elimination and mitigation of traffic congestion on highways is a factor in reducing traffic accidents and fatalities. In recent years, with the improvement of computing capabilities, research on traffic congestion reduction and mitigation has been conducted using traffic simulation. Traffic simulation allows us to reproduce and evaluate traffic phenomena that occur on roads on a computer. The Kakuto Tunnel is located on the border between Ebino City in Miyazaki Prefecture and Hitoyoshi City in Kumamoto Prefecture. The Kakuto Tunnel has insufficient traffic capacity and is frequently congested on holidays. In this study, we created a traffic simulator assuming the Kakuto Tunnel. In the simulation, we examined the effectiveness of increasing the number of lanes as a method of reducing traffic congestion.