Effective traffic routing for urban transportation capacity and safety enhancement

Abstract

Traffic routing is an essential service in most intelligent transportation systems (ITS), especially in urban traffic networks of large cities. However, this is a challenge issue as these traffic networks are complicated and traffic conditions change dynamically. Existing routing solutions from technology giants such as Google Maps, Waze are still insufficient in terms of accuracy (effectiveness) and efficiency (performance), especially applying in developing countries where traffic infrastructures have not yet matured enough, leading to degradation of transportation performance, safety while increasing traffic jam, economic loss, air and noise pollution. This work proposes an effective routing approach in large cities to avoid traffic congestion, enhancing transportation capacity and safety. Concretely, this work designed an appropriate urban traffic data organization scheme and devised a novel approach to searching solutions in an optimal routing algorithm, thus improve the routing performance significantly. Results from real-field experiments confirm the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed approaches which are prominent compared to the state-of-the-art solutions. The proposed approaches have been applied in a real urban traffic network of Ho Chi Minh City, the biggest city in Vietnam whose traffic is complicated. The experimental results and the practical deployed system reveal that the proposed mechanisms are ready to be applied in real-world applications.