Dynamic partition of urban network considering congestion evolution based on random walk

Abstract The successful application of perimeter control of urban traffic system strongly depends on the macroscopic fundamental diagram of the targeted region. Despite intensive studies on the partitioning of urban road networks, the dynamic partitioning of urban regions reflecting the propagation of congestion remains an open question. This paper proposes to partition the network into homogeneous sub-regions based on random walk algorithm. Starting from selected random walkers, the road network is partitioned from the early morning when congestion emerges. A modified Akaike information criterion is defined to find the optimal number of partitions. Region boundary adjustment algorithms are adopted to optimize the partitioning results to further ensure the correlation of partitions. The traffic data of Melbourne city are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed partitioning method.