Urban Traffic Simulation Methodology for Connected Vehicles Congestion Avoidance

Enhancing traffic experience in congested urban areas is one of the main challenge of Intelligent Transportation Systems caused by road infrastructure, time and investment cost. Since road infrastructure have very small chances to be changed and the changes' cost are high it is worth to address research solutions that have low costs and uses Intelligent Transportation System infrastructure's properties. Following this vision, in this work we propose a realistic cost efficient urban traffic simulation methodology in order to accurately simulate vehicular traffic. Such synthetic traffic can be used by congestion avoidance solutions implementations and evaluation in the context of connected vehicles that shares information based on a centralized Vehicle to Cloud infrastructure. The proposed traffic simulation methodology was validated on a real urban area map by using the fundamental traffic flow diagram metrics. Our findings shown the realistic behaviour and valuable output of the proposed model that can be used as input in traffic congestion avoidance solutions.