Application of Bat Algorithm for Transport Network Design Problem

The requirement of the road services and transportation network development planning came into existence with the development of civilization. In the modern urban transport scenario with the forever mounting amount of vehicles, it is very much essential to tackle network congestion and to minimize the travel time. This work is based on determining the optimal wait time at traffic signals for the microscopic discrete model. The problem is formulated as a bilevel model. The upper layer optimizes the travel time by reducing the wait time at traffic signal and the lower layer solves the stochastic user equilibrium. Soft computing techniques like Genetic Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization, and many other biologically inspired techniques prove to give good results for bilevel problems. Here this work uses Bat Intelligence to solve the transport network design problem. The results are compared with the existing techniques.