Dynamic Vehicular Traffic Load Quantification by Considering Intermittent Unused Road Space

With the goal of dynamic traffic scheduling, road planning, intelligent route optimization or traffic control, it is important to quantity the traffic load of a particular area of a road network as a vital factor of influence. An ever increasing number of vehicles which are capable of wireless communication enables new possibilities to measure this traffic load. In this paper, we introduce a methodology which quantifies the amount of traffic over time by the help of a cloud calculation service and vehicular communication. Furthermore, the approach is applicable also in vehicular traffic simulations, which are widely used to demonstrate the effects of proposed solutions to traffic problems in research. As unused road segments strongly influence the overall traffic load (i.e., used vs. full road capacity), we propose a methodology which dynamically calculates the load over time, and considers whether specific parts of the road network are used. We introduce two possibilities to filter out distortion of the created statistics due to variation in usage over time. Our novel approach is both simple but widely configurable to fit the individual needs. The approach is proven by simulations and application of the load calculation in combination with a intelligent route optimization approach by putting the optimization gain in contrast to the calculated traffic load.