Congestion Free Vehicle Scheduling Using a Route Reservation Strategy

Traffic congestion in big cities has been proven to be a difficult problem with adverse effects in terms of driver delay and frustration, cost and impact to the environment. Motivated by the approaches used in air-traffic control, this work investigates a method for controlling traffic congestion using time-dependent route reservation. The advances in information, communication and computation technologies has made such a reservation strategy feasible. This paper illustrates that the new reservation strategy is scalable and can be applied even to large metropolitan areas. To do so, we decompose the road network spatially and temporarily and propose a vehicle scheduling and routing algorithm which completely eliminate congestion. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is very promising.