Fuel Efficient Route Planning Using VANET

Traffic congestion due to overloaded road infrastructure is a key contributing factor of global warming. Dynamic route planning (DRP) of vehicles can be helpful to reduce congestion and provide faster and more fuel-efficient trips for vehicles. VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Network) and its associated WAVE (Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment) standards facilitate this process, by allowing vehicles to share accumulated travel data with each other and plan their routes based on the gathered information. Communication and decision making can be carried out using centralized or distributed approach and should consider network usage and scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel and scalable dynamic route planning approach that uses real-time traffic information to update vehicle routes. We introduce the concept of a delay threshold at intersections to identify traffic congestion and propose a hybrid metric that considers average travel time and occupancy rate for each road segment. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can lead to reductions in trip time and carbon emissions.