Modeling and simulating traffic congestion propagation in connected vehicles driven by temporal and spatial preference

Abstract

Differing from the traditional traffic, connected vehicles enable information sharing between vehicles at vicinity to facilitate cooperative path planning, which may positively affect the congestion propagation process. In this paper, we propose to modeling and simulating traffic congestion propagation in such new situation where the path planning is driven by a temporal or spatial preference with aims at investigating the effects of various factors on traffic congestion, e.g. traffic light, mobility pattern, traffic density and communication radius. Simulations show that the traffic congestion is indeed affected by the concerned factors; however, the traffic congestion fails to be mitigated persistently as the communication radius increases beyond a certain threshold. The result is helpful for understanding the traffic congestion propagation in connected vehicles.