Case studies in managing traffic in a developing country with privacy-preserving simulation as a service

Abstract

Simulation is known to be an effective technique to understand and manage traffic in cities of developed countries. However, in developing countries, traffic management is lacking due to a wide diversity of vehicles on the road, their chaotic movement, little instrumentation to sense traffic state and limited funds to create IT and physical infrastructure to ameliorate the situation. Under these conditions, in this paper, we present our approach of using the Megaffic traffic simulator as a service to gain actionable insights for two use-cases and cities in India, a first. Our approach is general to be readily used in other use cases and cities, and our results give new insights: (a) using demographics data, traffic demand can be reduced if timings of government offices are altered in Delhi, (b) using a mobile company's Call Data Record (CDR) data to mine trajectories anonymously, one can take effective traffic actions while organizing events in Mumbai at local scale.