Integrated Traffic Management System under Connected Environment

With the development of connected vehicles and the upgrade of roadside infrastructures, managing the behaviors of individual vehicles can be much easier and smarter for the purpose of solving traffic congestion and improving mobility services. However, due to the network size and number of vehicles in large cities, it is very challenging to manage all vehicles efficiently at multiple levels of road networks. The paper develops an integrated traffic management system to provide instructions at three different levels of road networks: section, region, and city, for connected vehicles to react to vehicle incidents on roads and to mitigate road congestion. The system utilizes connected vehicles to monitor road traffic conditions with low latency and to instruct vehicles with an integrated strategy to reduce the impact of incidents and congestion on both individual vehicles and entire road networks. A microscopic simulation, INTEGRATION, is applied to understand its benefits on mitigating traffic congestion at a large-scale road network. The results indicate that the system can reduce the travel time about 8% for connected vehicles and 14% for non-connected vehicles. In addition, a sensitivity analysis of the market penetration rate of connected vehicles is conducted to understand the performance of the system at different stages of developing connected vehicles.