A Route Guidance Method for Vehicles to Improve Driver’s Experienced Delay Against Traffic Congestion

The increase of the city population and the number of vehicles brought heavy traffic jam in many cities. To reduce traffic congestion is one of the important tasks in order to reduce economic loss as well as the environmental pollution. Several solutions to mitigate the traffic congestion has been proposed so far, but in most cases they try to optimize whole traffic in the area, and a few treats the route guidance methods when the traffic jam occurs. Once a traffic jam takes place, we hope to clear the jam immediately by means of changing paths of some vehicles. Several studies tackle this problem. However, they enforce vehicles located very close to the traffic jam to change their paths, which results in large delay due to inefficient detour paths. This not only fails to persuade the vehicle drivers to change their paths, but also causes another traffic jam on the detour paths. In this paper, based on the observation that some vehicles often have alternative paths to avoid congested road segments with similar taking time, we propose a new route guidance method that offers vehicles better alternative paths with which the time to reach their destinations would be minimized. Through evaluation, we demonstrated that the proposed method significantly reduces the traveling time of vehicles while clearing the traffic jam within the same time duration.