Vehicle road navigation to minimize pollutant exposure

Abstract

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) technology is often aimed at improving vehicle safety and mobility. Lately a number of ITS applications are also focusing on environmental issues such as reducing greenhouse gases (through improved fuel economy) and reducing overall pollutant emissions. Typical environmental ITS applications (e.g., eco-routing) focus on reducing total mass vehicle emissions for generalized areas. To date however, environmental ITS applications haven't considered emissions from a pollutant exposure point-of-view. In this paper, we introduce a new vehicle routing methodology that goes beyond minimizing overall pollutant emissions, instead minimizing pollutant exposure to localized populations along roadways. As part of this effort, a unique modeling suite has been developed to allow for the evaluation of environmental ITS applications from a traffic emissions exposure point of view. For the routing algorithm, the human intake fraction that is commonly used for quantifying emission exposure is modeled and used as a routing cost. Experimental modeling results show that the intake fraction of particulate matter for 5-14 year-old school children on school days can be reduced approximately 80%-90% on a typical schoolday with the implementation of intelligent routing algorithms.