Simulation study of the impact of local real-time traffic information provision strategy in connected vehicle systems

Current vehicle navigation systems usually rely on global real-time traffic information. They suggest the best paths to travelers through an independent and selfish-routing mechanism. Existing studies show that such systems have a great potential to cause traffic congestions oscillating among several alternative corridors, i.e., iteratively leading exceeding traffic into light traffic corridors and making congestion on one and then another within a short time period. To address this issue, this research proposes a local information provision strategy, given travelers are still guided by an independent and selfish-routing mechanism. The coverage of the real-time information provision is identified by the minimum bounding rectangle, and the ellipse method respectively. The benefits of the proposed strategy in system level are investigated by the simulation studies built upon the Borman expressway network. The simulation results indicate that as the local travel time information provision strategy is used, it may save 10-25% of the system travel time resulting from global information provision strategy under medium or high network traffic loads. Moreover, the sensitivity analyses indicate that the merits of the local travel time information provision strategy are more significant as the penetration of smart vehicles increases over the network. Thus, the proposed local information provision strategy outperforms global information provision strategy in system level network performance.