The impact of regulations for a centralised route guidance system

Abstract

This study aims to quantify the impact on the traffic flow performance of different regulation strategies for a centralised route guidance system where road authorities and service providers work together in a coordinated approach. Previous research concentrates on the effect of a centralised route guidance system when every vehicle participates and all vehicles have perfect knowledge of the traffic state. This is not the real case with human drivers and multiple service providers and the impact of cooperation may be limited. This study combines habitual driving behaviour, the effect of the quality of information and a congestion avoiding user optimum algorithm to quantify the impact of a centralised route guidance system. The congestion avoiding user optimum algorithm will add a perceived time penalty to all routes with links above a certain intensity/capacity ratio to avoid choosing the congested route. The cooperation is described by the coordinated approach model of the SOCRATES²·⁰ project. In this model, the cooperation is organised by an intermediary who takes on the management tasks. Because a lack of commitment could be a problem for the success of the system, the services of the intermediary can be regulated with four regulation strategies starting with no regulation to regulation for both service providers and road users. The impact is determined with the dynamic macroscopic traffic model MARPLE. The result shows that without commitment the system does not improve the traffic state. For the maximum potential of the system, it must be fully regulated for both service providers and road users. Although with only the commitment of service providers, there is already a positive impact on the traffic flow and in less complex networks it can already solve all congestion.