An optimal routing strategy for transport networks with minimal transmission cost and high network capacity

Abstract

This paper proposes a routing strategy by minimizing an integrated transmission cost including route cost, distance cost, and traffic pressure cost, which are quantified based on the available transportation routes and travel distance of edges, and the degree of nodes, respectively. In the routing strategy, an arriving rate function is proposed based on the characteristics of heterogeneous traffic demand of nodes, and two parameters, congestion parameter and cost importance parameter are proposed to evaluate the importance of different transmission costs. By tuning the parameters, an optimal routing strategy with high capacity is obtained for different applications. The numerical results on theoretical networks (Watts–Strogatz small-world network and Barabási–Albert network) and real networks (the bus and metro network in Beijing, China) show that the generated new routing strategy can significantly improve the system capacity and operation efficiency. Moreover, the significance of the proposed parameters on evaluating the importance of different transmission costs is precisely proved based on the experimental results, which indicates the effectiveness of the proposed routing strategy.