Advanced Traffic Management Systems: An Overview and A Development Strategy

Nowadays the problem of traffic congestion is known as the main cause of air pollution in the cities of the world. Urban traffic engineers and managers have proposed three general approaches to dealing with this phenomenon. The first approach expands the capacity of the urban traffic network (UTN). This approach cannot be implemented in many urban areas due to urban density and traffic volume. The second approach can be called the traffic assignment. In this approach, through software applications or information boards, network managers are informed about the users' status in the network and offer the best route to them. Finally, the third approach involves optimizing the capacity of the UTN. This approach tries to control the traffic actuators in order to create the maximum capacity for network users. Therefore, it can be said that the advanced traffic management systems (ATMS) are based on four main sections. These four sections include traffic information, traffic assignment, traffic optimization, and traffic prediction. This paper initially presents an overview of these four sections, in the end, it proposes a development strategy for the ATMSs.