Quality Evaluation of Vehicle Navigation with Cyber Physical Systems

In this article, we focus on a typical application of Cyber Physical System (CPS), i.e., vehicle route navigation. Two fundamental problems have been examined: 1) How different are various vehicle routing algorithms? 2) How valuable is real-time traffic information or historical traffic information in helping vehicle routing? Different from most previous works based on simulations, we presented performance comparisons of four routing algorithms using real GPS sensory data from 4000 taxis. It has been shown that using real-time traffic information could substantially improve the quality of vehicle path routing. This can benefit an individual driver, because through our evaluation results on realistic vehicle traces we found that the paths selected by taxi drivers are not as good as expected. More importantly, utilizing real-time information could improve global transportation efficiency in terms of dispersing/managing traffic, which plays a key role in constructing an effective vehicular CPS.