Road Traffic Congestion Monitoring in Urban Areas: A Review

Road traffic congestion is a very serious concern for urbanization. The economy of a country is also affected by this. Most traffic congestions are caused due to the unplanned road networks, high volume of vehicles on the roads, and presence of critical congestion areas. Urbanization is also playing an important role to increase the traffic jams and accidents in the urban areas. Severe traffic jams lengthen the journey time because of which productivity and business are badly affected. Moreover, it also increases the fuel consumption as well as air pollutions in the urban areas. So, road traffic congestion poses a serious challenge for all growing cities. Hence, a lot of researchers have focused on the problem of monitoring and management of vehicular congestion in the urban areas. The effective management of road vehicular congestion via adaptive traffic signal scheduling policy, on the other hand, depends on proper measuring and assessment of the vehicular congestion. Hence, a significant number of road traffic congestion monitoring, predicting, and assessment techniques using various types of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been devised over the past few decades. Thus, this chapter extensively reviews various road traffic congestion measuring and assessment techniques proposed in the literature over the past few decades.