Cost and Benefit Analysis of An Integrated Traffic Management System Utilizing Connected Vehicles

The development of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) enables advanced traffic management to improve urban mobility, driving safety, and energy efficiency. An integrated traffic management system was developed to manage a very large number of CAVs in a large network. However, the operational cost of the integrated system is not well evaluated. In this paper, a comprehensive cost and benefit analysis of an integrated traffic management system is conducted to demonstrate the potential implementations of the system in large-scale cities with CAVs in the future. The analysis is conducted in Los Angeles, USA with the implementation of the integrated system for different layers of the network. The savings of the system on mobility and energy are evaluated under different market penetration rates of CAVs. And, the cost of the system on transmitting messages and operating the integrated system at different layers will also be measured. The combined savings and cost of the system is summarized to illustrate its overall benefits for the entire transportation services in LA downtown. The results indicates that the computational cost increases linearly with respect to the market penetration rates (MPRs) of CAVs. And, at higher MPRs, the monetary savings for the entire network are larger due to the significant improvement of mobility.