An Automated Game Theoretic Approach for Cooperative Road Traffic Management in Disaster

Transportation system gets paralyzed when a place affected by any catastrophic natural disaster. Some roads get blocked and vehicle density increases in all the other remaining routes. Each vehicle stuck at different position of the road network and tries to reach its destination in minimum time. A cooperative game theory based approach is proposed to regulate road traffic and minimize the waiting time of individual vehicles in any disaster situation. Each vehicle acts as a player and tries to increase its payoff value. Payoff value is based on the different parameters of the vehicle like its arrival time, velocity, priority and traffic density. Payoff value is adjusted according to the existing vehicle density in the road segment. Traffic density of each road is minimized simultaneously which increases the flow of the vehicles in the network cooperatively. Waiting time of a vehicle is directly proportional to the number of adjacent edges of the corresponding node and its density. The method also shows that any vehicle with higher priority will cross the road in minimum time. New alternative road creation process is also proposed based on graph theory for the worst situation. The alternative path will join the affected road with a minimum utilized node in the network to evacuate the affected traffic. Experimental results suggest that our proposed method achieve minimum average waiting time compare to the existing method. The shortest time travel path is found for each vehicle from its source to the desired destination in post disaster situation.