Link Restriction: Methods of Testing and Avoiding Braess Paradox in Networks Considering Traffic Demands

Braess paradox is a well-known paradox in transportation researches. In urban cities, there are many different kinds of complex road networks. Unavoidably, some of them fall into the Braess paradox and it is hardly realized. In this paper, two proposed approaches are applied to find and avoid the Braess paradox in urban road networks. With the first approach, the links that cause the Braess paradox in the urban road networks with the current origination-destination (OD) matrix can be tested. The other approach is to calculate the range of the OD flows that makes these links fall into the Braess paradox. Unlike other approaches proposed in literature, this proposed approach can figure out the range of traffic demands in the networks with multiple OD pairs. Moreover, by applying these two approaches, the authors design a traffic management called link restriction which can easily figure out which link should be closed down temporarily and when to resume operation to reduce the total travel times of networks with flexible managements.