A Flow-Based Centralized Route Guidance System for Traffic Congestion Mitigation

We propose a new route guidance system (RGS) to mitigate traffic congestion called Flow-based Capacity-aware Rerouting (FCR), which achieves better global optimality by considering the capacity of detour routes. FCR introduces a flow-based traffic management method that enables us to compute detour paths in units of flow rather than per vehicle processing, which reduces the load to calculate detour paths and makes the centralized system practically feasible. With the flow-based traffic management, FCR also enables us to consider traffic volume that should bypass the congested roads to mitigate the congestion and suggest detour paths to the corresponding traffic volume of vehicles. By prioritizing travel time loss when choosing detour routes to apply, FCR leads to better global optimality with the limited volume of rerouting traffic while considering each rerouted vehicle’s benefit, such as travel time loss. FCR offers a new centralized system architecture for actual real-time traffic control, which improves both global optimality and each vehicle’s benefit within a feasible computational load.