This interdisciplinary research focuses on the effects of traffic congestion, and on evaluating alternative investments to manage the demand for transport services, as well as the social and behavioral impact of these investments. Today traffic flows continue to rapidly outpace resources available to society for improving the transportation infrastructure, and better management of existing facilities would be a cost effective way for resolving the problem. Since congestion depends on the policies chosen by the traffic authorities, and on the social interaction of individuals as drivers and passengers, analyzing congestion requires an integrated approach that allows for different viewpoints: the transportation agencies', the consumers', as well as the perspective of society as a whole. The primary objective of this research is to find an optimal mix of strategies that will spread traffic congestion over geographical space and time by better utilization of current resources, thereby reducing its costs. These strategies, such as dynamic pricing or highway reservation methods, have either been implemented in few selected areas in the United States, or have been discussed conceptually; however, their effects on travel and the urban infrastructure are not well understood. We propose to bring together tools from economics, systems engineering, and transportation engineering for a comprehensive analysis of the congestion problem. A number of concurrent objectives will be pursued in this research, which involves artificial intelligence models of users' transportation services, a set of economic experiments to evaluate different transportation policies, a model of the interaction of social networks and transportation choices, and a system dynamics analysis of transportation and social networks and their dynamic evolution. The successful completion of this research will have the potential to lead to new paradigms of traffic analysis and to a new understanding of the linkages between transportation, the urban infrastructure and ultimately the regional economy.
