Choosing Routes in Urban Areas that are Robust Against Minor Nonrecurring Traffic Incidents

Abstract

The paper looks at certain vehicle-level re-routing issues within urban road networks, and related network-level traffic management issues. These arise mostly when the traffic along a route of significance is hindered, slowed down, or even blocked because of some – possibly minor – unexpected, nonrecurring traffic incident at a sensitive road location, or road section. Considerations for planning routes in urban areas – routes that are in some sense robust against such incidents – are presented herein. Also, the on–the–spot detection of traffic queues by an ego-vehicle – relying on data streams from on-board visual line-of-sight (LoS) exteroceptive sensors watching, scanning and monitoring the ego-vehicle's road environment, and by some on-board dedicated real-time detection systems processing and analyzing the incoming data streams – is touched upon. However, this traffic congestion avoidance and mitigating approach – effectuated either by individual autonomous vehicles, or by human drivers – presumes availability of alternative routes, which is not the case for a good portion of the route considered. A route planning approach that could be used for routes with such critical sections is proposed and motivated through an example of an urban route of significance.