Distributed Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) System Based on Connected Vehicle Technology

The efficiency of Public Transport (PT) has significantly improved thanks to Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems. They are used by several applications, such as realtime passenger information systems, transit signal priority, and control schemes designed to reduce the negative effects of bus bunching. Currently, these applications rely on a centralised architecture, i.e. buses equipped with communication and location detection technologies constantly send their positions to the AVL centre. In this paper, we demonstrate how a distributed AVL system can be designed on the basis of Connected Vehicle (CV) technology, i.e. information about bus location is exchanged in the PT network via buses equipped with the technology. Using computation experiments based on microscopic traffic simulations we demonstrate that CV-based AVL works efficiently when it comes to providing a bus with information about locations of buses ahead of it. However, information about buses behind is far less reliable, and requires additional support in message dissemination (e.g. by private vehicles).