Staggered working hours in order to reduce traffic congestion

Abstract

Today traffic congestion is one of the most important problems that adversely affect human life in many aspects. Traffic congestion is experienced during the morning and evening peak hours which have the highest traffic intensity. The main reason of the traffic congestion during the peak hours is that the work start and finish times of the firms in both private and public sectors are very close. Spreading the travel demand during peak hours for longer time period is a means to reduce the traffic congestion during the peak hours. The staggered working hours is one of the methods used for this purpose. In this study, a mathematical model is proposed to reduce the traffic congestion by using the staggered working hours strategy. The aim of the model is to find the working hours of the each destination node by considering the travel demands between origin-destination nodes, the paths and the capacities of the roads. A 0-1 integer goal programming model is developed for this purpose. The developed model is solved for different sized data sets. The results show that the staggered working hours strategy will significantly reduce the peak hours traffic congestion.