Improving Traffic in Urban Environments applying the Wardrop Equilibrium

Abstract

Over the last few years vehicular traffic density has continuously increased and it is likely that the traffic demand will further increase in the future. In many metropolitan areas the road infrastructure is no longer able to handle the peak traffic demand and the existing road network cannot be easily extended. The best way to improve the traffic situation is to optimise the resources available in the transportation network and to coordinate the traffic demand. The approach that we propose in this paper makes use of a collaborative traffic coordination protocol which collects real-time Floating Car Data (FCD) directly from participating vehicles and suggests dynamic routes in order to minimize travel delay. Information such as speed, position and direction is sent to one or more Traffic Coordination Points (TCPs) where it is aggregated to obtain a global picture of the traffic conditions in real-time. Based on this data, we continuously compute the route that minimizes the travel time to a given destination by applying Wardrop's first principle of equilibrium. Our results show that, by coordinating the vehicles, we are able to better distribute the overall traffic demand throughout the transportation network, reducing the average travel times and accommodating more vehicles.