Road Network Graph Representation for Traffic Analysis and Routing

The road network is the infrastructure along which the mobility of users and goods takes place; the analysis of these networks in terms of spatial and graph theoretical approaches can provide insights to understand urban mobility, improve daily commuting, and reflect on new, more sustainable, scenarios. This paper presents an open-source framework to analyze the road network and investigate the relationship between its topology and traffic conditions. Open-source geographical data are stored in a graph database containing roads, junctions, and Points of Interest (POI), allowing importing of traffic data. The framework includes routing algorithms to obtain the optimal path based on different aspects such as distance, traffic volume, and the number of traversed junctions; furthermore, it allows simulating road closures to observe how they affect road viability. The framework was tested in the use case of the city of Modena (Italy) providing promising results.