ICARUS: Improvement of traffic Condition through an Alerting and Re-routing System

In cities, where the number of vehicles continuously increase faster than the available infrastructure to contain them, traffic congestion is a difficult issue to deal with. This problem becomes even worse in case of accidents and affects many aspects of the modern society, including economic development, accidents, CO (Carbon monoxide) emission, trip time, and health. Several solutions for Traffic Management System (TMS) have been proposed to identify congestions and re-route the vehicles afterward. To this end, they exchange messages periodically between vehicles and central server, what can cause an overhead in the communication channel. In this scenario, it is important to identify the source of the problem and inform the drivers of new routes before the congestion takes place with, considering the limitations of vehicular communication. This work introduces ICARUS, a distributed and pro-active Traffic Management System, which receives notifications about a traffic events then it can calculates new routes, and, then, notifies drivers to follow new paths pro-actively by using inter-vehicle communications. Simulation results show the effectiveness of ICARUS in calculating new routes and disseminating them to vehicles approaching a congested area. Hence, ICARUS reduces the travel time, fuel consumption, and CO emissions of vehicles in urban environments when compared to existing approaches. In addition, ICARUS reduces the broadcast storm problem and maximizes the data dissemination capabilities with short delays and low overhead.