Traffic congestion in urban areas has become a critical problem that municipal governments cannot overlook. Meanwhile, mixed traffic systems containing both autonomous and human-driven electric vehicles ramp up the challenge for traffic management in urban areas. Although numerous researchers have proposed traffic control heuristics to alleviate traffic congestion problems in the recent literature, scant research has addressed the joint problems of route and charging strategies for electric vehicles along with urban traffic congestion prevention. Accordingly, this work tackles the complex task of traffic management in urban areas during peak periods by using practical congestion prevention strategies that consider the characteristics of mixed traffic flows and the charging demands of electric vehicle users. Notably, we apply support vector regressions to compute the charging time at each charging point and the traverse time of an electric vehicle at each road segment/intersection, based on historical traffic data. The simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithms are feasible because they can avoid possible occurrences of traffic congestion during rush hours and provide the routes and charging options that are chosen by electric vehicle users.

Traffic congestion in metropolitan areas all over the world has become a critical issue that governments mustdeal with effectively. Traffic congestion during rush hours causes vehicle drivers to arrive late at their destinations,resulting in significant economic losses. Although researchers have proposed solutions to the traffic congestionproblem, little research work has presented a joint route and charging planning strategy for electric vehicles(EVs) that alleviates traffic congestion problems simultaneously. Accordingly, a congestion-preventing route and charging planning mechanism for EVs is proposed in this work to tackle the complicated route and charging optimizationproblems of EVs. The route and charging planning proposed in this work analyzes the information providedby EVs, the charging points, and road traffic information simultaneously, and mediates the traffic jammingby means of a route and charging reservation mechanism. Possible occurrence of traffic congestion is detectedin advance and traffic regulation is carried out by allocating an elastic range to the traveling period for late-bookingEVs, to avoid moving during rush hours. EV owners are also encouraged to provide rideshare services forlate-booking EV users during rush hours. The simulation results reveal that the proposed work can satisfy thepreferred route and charging demands of EV users and alleviate traffic congestion effectively.