Impact of Varying Penetration Rate of Intelligent Routing Capabilities on Vehicular Traffic Flow

Beyond question, the improvement of traffic flow is a hot topic in current research, and numerous proposals how to optimize traffic on the roads exist. Distributed communication systems have come up recently as a very important mechanism in modern road networks in order to deal with this issue. Also, traffic delay problems due to jams are manifesting in many of the urban centers worldwide. With the objective of decreasing and in the best case avoiding congestion, V2X communication is exploited in order to counteract traffic jams by intelligent rerouting. Notwithstanding, the transition from very low penetration rates of vehicles that are equipped with communication functionality to a situation where basically all vehicles have the capability to send and receive information will not be made overnight. To a greater degree, the penetration of connected vehicles will increase more and more, which further will result in a very long period of mixed composition. This paper focuses on the analysis of a variable ratio of vehicles with routing and communication capabilities to those who are not. It analyzes the performance of a predictive rerouting algorithm when a distinct percentage of vehicles is unable to communicate for distinct traffic densities, and proves by simulations that even penetration rates far from a hundred percent lead to an improvement of the average time and fuel consumption as well as CO2 emissions per vehicle.