A Distributed Urban Traffic Congestion Prevention Mechanism for Mixed Flow of Human-Driven and Autonomous Electric Vehicles

Abstract

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.