Abstract
ABSTRACTThe increase of wasted time and pollution due to vehicular traffic has paved the way to many different countermeasures, ranging from the enforcement of congestion tolls to the commercialization of vehicles powered by low‐emission hybrid engines. Advanced traveler information systems (ATISs), which are capable of supplying updated traffic information to all those citizens that are driving through city roads, represent a prominent approach to combat vehicular congestion. In brief, ATISs are concerned with collecting, processing, and disseminating traffic information, providing data that can be profitably exploited by an on‐board navigation system to compute the most convenient route to a given destination. Indeed, their role becomes progressively more relevant as their accuracy and reliability increases, thus encouraging more and more people to utilize them while driving. With this in mind, we devised a new congestion detection model that accurately estimates and forecasts the short‐term congestion state of a road without requiring any prior knowledge regarding any of its parameters. Such model can be easily integrated within an ATIS and usefully applied to any given road. The efficacy of our model is here proved through the results of several experiments, which witness the validity of our approach. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Highlights
Vehicular congestion in urban areas has steadily grown during the years to become one of the primary problems tackled by city administrators
We propose a new traffic congestion definition, which draws its inspiration from a relevant line of research that has studied how the capacity and the bandwidth occupied by an Internet connection could be efficiently determined by observing the end-to-end delay of Internet Protocol packets [14,15]
To conclude with the third proposal, we refer to the service provided by Google Traffic, as a practical service of common use providing drivers with traffic information before they begin their journey and while driving, through navigation units that are installed on their cellphones [22]
Summary
Vehicular congestion in urban areas has steadily grown during the years to become one of the primary problems tackled by city administrators. The constant increase of vehicular congestion in many cities, throughout the world, has led to the devise of a plethora of different approaches that aim at stopping and, possibly, inverting such trend One of such approaches, termed advanced traveler information systems (ATISs), is built upon the joint use of advanced information and communication technologies and global positioning systems (GPSs). Our definition starts from the observation that any two cars that traverse the same street will probably experience the same congested traffic conditions, assuming that they do traverse it not too far away in time one from the other This is due to the inertia of vehicular queues, which causes a road to remain congested for a given period equal to, say S , even if, at a certain point in time, the ingress flow to that road rapidly drops.
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