A new ant colony routing approach with a trade-off between system and user optimum

Dynamic traffic routing (DTR) refers to the process of (re)directing traffic at junctions in a traffic network corresponding to the evolving traffic conditions as time progresses. This paper considers the DTR problem for a traffic network defined as a directed graph, and deals with the mathematical aspects of the resulting optimization problem from the viewpoint of network flow theory. Traffic networks may have thousands of links and nodes, resulting in a sizable and computationally complex nonlinear, non-convex DTR optimization problem. To solve this problem Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is chosen as the optimization method in this paper because of its powerful optimization heuristic for combinatorial optimization problems. However, the standard ACO algorithm is not capable of solving the routing optimization problem aimed at the system optimum, and therefore a new ACO algorithm is developed to achieve the goal of finding the optimal distribution of traffic flows in the network.