SOLUTIONS PROVIDED FROM THE USE OF ALGORITHMS IN TRAFFIC LIGHTS REGULATION. TIRANA CASE

Tirana is not only the capital of Albania, but also the largest center of its social, economic and cultural development. In the two decades of this beginning of the century, Tirana has undergone significant changes, both quantitatively and qualitatively. With the status of the largest region and with about one third of the total population nationwide [1], it is part of the "triangle" Tirana - Durres-Elbasan, which generates about 75% of Albania's GDP. Like all of Albania, Tirana was affected by the migration and urbanization phenomenon, which brought the necessity of deep improvements in road infrastructure, both interurban and urban. The largest arteries of the Albanian road network, the North-South Corridor and the East-West Corridor, consisting in most of them of the main interurban road, pass through its territory. The need to cope with an ever-increasing flow of vehicles, as a result of demographic changes, also conditioned the need to design new transport systems. We think that this paper also contributes to this goal, which theoretically deals with problems of improving the traffic light regulation of the capital, combined with the use of Intelligent Transport Systems. Based on the experience and literature of developed European countries in this regard, some of the most used algorithms were analyzed to find the most optimal solution for the project. The comparison between the methods and the calibration of the different values of the topology variables, serve for the engineering calculations of the traffic flows. The latter, then, are part of projects for improvement interventions in the existing infrastructure network.