Operations research and semantic control: Application to advanced traffic management

Operations Research is well known for the plethora of tools and techniques it offers to address complex and sometimes non-intuitive problems. In this paper we propose the use of the semantic control paradigm as a framework for the development of advanced traffic management systems, and show how the tools afforded to us by OR can be applied within this framework to solve problems in traffic management. A brief overview is given of the scope of problems addressed by OR, and of the structure of a semantic control system. This is followed with an example showing the application of artificial neural networks and shortest path algorithms to the problem of estimating highway traffic volume and the subsequent allocation of traffic to maintain road capacity.