Solving Traffic Problems in the State of Kerala, India: Forecasting, Regression and Simulation Models
Ramesh Bollapragada,
Sudesh Poduval,
Chetty Bingi S,
Bhoomi Brahmbhatt
Affiliations
Ramesh Bollapragada
is a Professor in the Decision Sciences Department of the College of Business, San Francisco State University (SFSU), San Francisco, USA since 2002. He has worked as a Research Scientist at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies in Holmdel, NJ for six years. He has a B.Tech. and M.S. in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from India and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Management of Manufacturing and Automation from the Graduate School of Business and School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, U.S.A. His research interests are in the areas of scheduling and economic lot-sizing, forecasting, inventory and supply chain optimization, telecommunication network planning, transportation, quality management and outsourcing. E-mail:
Sudesh Poduval
has a B. Tech in Computer Science & Engineering from Government Engineering College, Calicut University, India, and an MBA from San Francisco State University, San Francisco, USA. He has been Manager of Product Design at Phoenix American Inc., San Rafael CA for the past 3 years. Sudesh has been involved in the entire software development life cycle and has used programming languages from Java to C+, tools from PowerBuilder to NET, and database systems from Sybase to Oracle. He has worked in the mutual fund and insurance industries in Mumbai, Boston and San Rafael (California). He has taken certifications in Java and Oracle over the course of his career as a software professional spanning 24 years. At San Francisco State University, Sudesh served as a member of Beta Gamma Sigma. E-mail:
Chetty Bingi S
is currently the Chief Executive Officer (Diversification), Global Procurement Consultants Limited, Mumbai. He holds a Bachelor and Master Degrees in Engineering from SV University and Doctorate in Management from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Earlier, he was with the Administrative Staff College (ASCI), Hyderabad, India as a management consultant/faculty from 1978 till 2006; At ASCI, he served as the BHEL Chair professor for six years and the Dean of Consultancy from 1998–2003. He was with Massachusetts Institute of Technology as senior research fellow with the Centre for Manufacturing and Productivity during 1992 and was trained by the World Bank in 1997 as an Accredited Procurement Specialist Trainer. He worked as international procurement consultant with Nepal, Iran, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Kenya and Malawi; and also worked as consultant with World Bank offices in Nepal and India. He published several referred articles in and . E-mail:
Bhoomi Brahmbhatt
works as an independent consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA. She is currently helping global e-commerce web team at a leading luxury brand with their website re-design project. In the past, Bhoomi has worked in both B2B and B2C tech industries; helping fortune 500 brands to emerging start-ups, with various roles and responsibilities in the areas of Marketing, Digital Strategy, and Analytics. E-mail:
Executive Summary Indian states have been facing traffic related issues including traffic congestions and accidents for decades. The situation has worsened with time due to the increasing population. This article investigates the causes behind the accidents and provides recommendations and measures that would bring forth an improvement in the traffic conditions. The research uses forecasting models to confirm the existence of traffic problem in the State of Kerala. The various reasons for the accidents were enumerated and classified. Using regression models, the relationship between the number of accidents, deaths, and injured were obtained. In addition, the relationship between the number of accidents and the number of vehicles on road were examined along with the type of vehicle, design of the roads, the design of traffic, and the design of road network. In addition, a simulation model is presented to study the effect of the change in design of roads on the traffic situation. As an example, a 15-minute time period can be used to count the number of vehicles of each type (buses, cars, and trucks) travelling in both directions on a major highway. This data can then be categorized into slow and fast moving traffic. The Mean time between arrivals, percentages of slow and fast vehicles, percentages of vehicles travelling in both directions can be calculated and used in ARENA simulation software to perform discrete event simulation. Various scenarios are simulated; and waiting times and potential number of accidents are found for each of the scenarios. Based on forecasting, regression and simulation models, this article provides several recommendations and managerial insights, which are believed to alleviate the traffic problems in the State of Kerala. The solution approaches from this research could be used for addressing similar traffic situations in other states of India, which could result in saving millions of lives over the next decade.
