Exploring an Evolutionary Traffic Flow Landscape with a Fitness Approach

The road patterns of major metropolitan areas and constituent jurisdictions evolve slowly through a complex set of independent and interdependent decisions producing a transportation network. The resulting network must be used for variety of commuting and spatial interaction activity. A typical trip taker spends considerable time on the road to reach the workplace and other destinations. Adding more links to existing road networks and/or increasing traffic capacity by adding lanes does not necessarily decrease travel times. However, a dense redundant network of roads provides a trip taker with alternate routes when traffic congestion occurs. Such issues raise the question of how to evaluate the flow characteristics of the entire road network of a jurisdiction or its larger region? We explore a methodology to evaluate fitness criteria for road networks based on Kauffman s evolutionary complexity or NK model (1993) and develop an information theoretic measure of the order or organization in transportation networks.