Effective Multi-region Traffic Control and Demand Management Using an Overlay Route-Reservation Scheme

In this work, we assume that a heterogeneous urban area is partitioned into multiple homogeneous regions. The proposed approach creates an overlay graph which is used by the reservation architecture to control the traffic flow within each region. In this framework, a vehicle is allowed to enter a region only if it is anticipated that the region will not exceed its critical capacity during the time-interval that the vehicle will require to traverse an urban region. When a vehicle is about to start its journey, it informs a road side unit (RSU) about its origin and destination. Then the RSU responds with the starting time and the path to be followed by the vehicle. The given starting time manages each region's inflow while the given path avoids regions that are expected to be at capacity when the vehicle is expected to traverse the particular region. In this paper, the route-reservation problem is formulated and heuristic solutions are proposed to solve it in an online fashion. Finally, micro-simulations across an area of San Francisco are conducted to demonstrate the gains of the proposed approach.