Urban Congestion Avoidance Methodology Based on Vehicular Traffic Thresholding

Abstract

Vehicular traffic in urban areas faces congestion challenges that negatively impact our lives. The infrastructure associated with intelligent transportation systems provides means for addressing the associated challenges in urban areas. This study proposes an effective and scalable vehicular traffic congestion avoidance methodology. It introduces a traffic thresholding mechanism to predict and avoid vehicular traffic congestion during route computation. Our methodology was evaluated and validated by employing four road network topologies, three vehicular traffic density levels and various traffic light configurations, resulting in 26 urban traffic scenarios. Using our approach, the number of vehicles that can run in free flow can be increased by up to 200%, whereas for traffic congestion scenarios, the time spent in traffic may be reduced by up to 69% and CO2 emissions by up to 61%. To the best of our knowledge, in the vehicular traffic flow prediction domain, this is the first approach that covers a set of road network topologies and a large and representative set of scenarios for simulated urban traffic congestion testing. Moreover, the comparative analysis with different other solutions in the domain, showed that we obtained the best driving time and CO2 emission reduction.