Reducing Greenhouse Effects via Fuel Consumption-Aware Variable Speed Limit (FC-VSL)

Given the heated discussion of climate change and the ever-increasing demand for fossil fuels, the ability to reduce vehicular carbon footprints is of great importance for both environmental and economical reasons. This paper presents a carbon-footprint/fuel-consumption-aware variable-speed limit (FC-VSL) traffic control scheme that targets minimizing the average vehicular fuel consumption on freeways under live traffic conditions. We first formulated the problem of minimizing fuel consumption for a single vehicle under certain traffic conditions as an optimal control problem. By solving the problem, we obtained the optimal vehicular trajectory, which results in minimum fuel consumption. Then, we designed the FC-VSL scheme based on the optimal trajectory. We evaluated the performance of the FC-VSL scheme through detailed simulation. The results show that the FC-VSL scheme can significantly reduce the average fuel consumption and outperform another speed limit scheme that was designed to smooth traffic flow without considering fuel consumption.