Application of vehicular communications for improving the efficiency of traffic in urban areas

This paper studies the impacts of vehicular communications on efficiency of traffic in urban areas. We consider a Green Light Optimized Speed Advisory application implementation in a typical reference area and present the results of its performance analysis using an integrated cooperative intelligent transportation systems simulation platform. In addition, we study route alternation using vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Our interest was to monitor the impacts of these applications on fuel and traffic efficiency by introducing metrics for average fuel consumption, average stop time behind a traffic light and average trip time, respectively. For gathering the results, we implemented two traffic scenarios defining routes through an urban area including traffic lights. The simulations are varied for different penetration rates of application-equipped vehicles, driver's compliance to the advised speed and traffic density. Our results indicate that Green Light Optimized Speed Advisory systems could improve fuel consumption, reduce traffic congestion in junctions and the total trip time. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.