Traffic and Demand Management in the Era of Connected Vehicles

Overview & Synopsis

Traffic congestion in modern cities inflicts substantial economic and societal burdens, manifesting in issues like reduced productivity, heightened driver stress, and fuel wastage. Traffic congestion emerges when road demand surpasses available road capacity. Despite numerous proposed traffic management solutions, congestion remains an unsolved problem. A notable limitation of existing solutions is their primary focus on redistributing traffic spatially across the network. While this might momentarily relieve specific congested points, it often merely redistributes or delays the emergence of congestion. This Chapter introduces an innovative route reservation architecture aimed not only at alleviating congestion but also at enhancing the overall efficiency of the road network in terms of the average time vehicles spend within it. This architecture seamlessly integrates traffic management, steering drivers through the network, with demand management, influencing drivers’ departure timings. The architecture offers flexibility in application; it can provide direct routing and departure suggestions to drivers or, alternatively, utilize dynamic pricing mechanisms to influence their route and departure decisions. To ensure the robustness of the methodologies and algorithms derived from this architecture, this chapter provides extensive validation via detailed micro-simulations.