Performance evaluation of an Adaptive Route Change application using an integrated cooperative ITS simulation platform

In this paper we present simulation results for our implementation of Adaptive Route Change (ARC) application for cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The general purpose of the application is to generate recommendations for alternative driving routes in order to avoid traffic congestion. The Adaptive Route Change (ARC) application is implemented in an integrated cooperative ITS simulation platform. For the evaluation we chose a reference scenario defining two distinct traffic flows through an urban area that provides four crossings with traffic light controls. We were interested to evaluate the impacts of ARC on fuel and traffic efficiency. For that we introduced five performance metrics (average trip duration, average fuel consumption, average stop duration, maximum queue size and average queue size behind traffic lights) and evaluated ARC in a series of simulations with varied application penetration rates and traffic volume. The results indicate that ARC systems could reduce traffic congestion in intersections and improve fuel consumption. We observe up to one quarter reduction in average trip time and almost one third reduction in average stop time. Fuel consumption is also reduced by up to 17.3%, while average queue size and maximum queue size reduce more than 50%.