One-way urban traffic reconfiguration using a multi-objective harmony search approach

The use of intelligent optimization systems has been a major topic of research in the last few years for improving the existing urban infrastructure, the traffic optimization and the mobility of citizens. These techniques are of great importance in the analysis and optimization of transportation networks, as well as their re-organization to improve users’ mobility. In this paper we focus on the reconfiguration of one-way roads in a city after the occurrence of a major problem (e.g. a long-term road cut) in order to provide alternative routes that guarantee the mobility of citizens. In this manuscript a novel definition of this problem is formulated, for whose efficient resolution a novel two-objective approach based on the harmony search (HS) algorithm is proposed. The effectiveness of this proposal is tested in several synthetic instances, along with a real scenario in a city near Madrid, Spain. Extensive simulation results have been analyzed to verify that our proposal obtains excellent results in all the considered scenarios.