Equipoising multi-modal traffic environments using vehicular ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Competent transportation infrastructure is one of the prominent factors influencing sustainable economic growth and appreciable living standard in a country. Urban cities habitually equipped with multi-modal traffic flows which encompass various modes of transportation mechanisms such as walking, skating, cycling, motorcycles, three wheelers, private passenger cars, public transport modes like buses or trains, etc. Efficient urban traffic planning has become an exigent task involving complex behavioural analysis of multi-modal traffic scenarios. One possible way of enhancing the travel experience of commuters is by revolutionizing the vehicular communication strategies to devise intelligent routing approaches. Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are a special type of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) which can be used to define intelligent conciliator interfaces for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) or vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication needs. In this paper, we propose an approach for equilibrating multi-modal traffic environments after road block situations occur through VANET scenario simulations. For this research, we have used OMNeT++ network simulator to simulate the mobile network involved and SUMO microscopic traffic simulator to simulate vehicular movements in parallel and Veins framework as a bridging interface between OMNeT++ and SUMO. We have validated our solution with two heterogeneous metropolitan areas located in the cities of Kandy and Colombo in Sri Lanka. Our solution achieved lower values for waiting time and trip duration of vehicles and qualitatively improving the traffic flow when comparing against the absence of equilibrating module.