A Real-Time En-Route Route Guidance Decision Scheme for Transportation-Based Cyberphysical Systems

In transportation-based cyberphysical systems (TCPS), also known as intelligent transportation systems (ITS), to increase traffic efficiency, a number of dynamic route guidance schemes have been designed to assist drivers in determining optimal routes for their travels. To determine optimal routes, it is critical to effectively predict the traffic condition of roads along the guided routes based on real-time traffic information collected by vehicular networks to mitigate traffic congestion and improve traffic efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic En-route Decision real-time Route guidance (DEDR) scheme to effectively mitigate road congestion caused by the sudden increase of vehicles and to reduce travel time and fuel consumption. DEDR considers real-time traffic information generation and transmission by vehicular networks. Based on the shared traffic information, DEDR introduces the trust probability to predict traffic conditions and to dynamically, en route, determine alternative optimal routes. DEDR also considers multiple metrics to comprehensively assess traffic conditions so that drivers can determine the optimal route with a preference to these metrics during travel. DEDR considers effects of external factors (bad weather, incidents, etc.) on traffic conditions as well. Through a combination of extensive theoretical analysis and simulation experiments, our data show that DEDR can greatly increase traffic efficiency in terms of time efficiency, balancing efficiency, and fuel efficiency, in comparison with existing schemes.