International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

International Journal of Transportation

Science and Technology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijtst

Simulation study of the impact of local real-time traffic

information provision strategy in connected vehicle systems
Shuwei Chen a, Lili Du b,⇑
a
Guangxi Transportation Research Institute, #6 Gaoxin 2nd Rd., Nanning, Guangxi 530022, China
b
Department of Civil Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, 3201 South Dearborn Street, Chicago, IL 60616, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Current vehicle navigation systems usually rely on global real-time traffic information.
Received 24 February 2017 They suggest the best paths to travelers through an independent and selfish-routing mech-
Received in revised form 26 May 2017 anism. Existing studies show that such systems have a great potential to cause traffic con-
Accepted 8 June 2017
gestions oscillating among several alternative corridors, i.e., iteratively leading exceeding
Available online 15 June 2017
traffic into light traffic corridors and making congestion on one and then another within
a short time period. To address this issue, this research proposes a local information pro-
Keywords:
vision strategy, given travelers are still guided by an independent and selfish-routing
Local information provision
Information coverage
mechanism. The coverage of the real-time information provision is identified by the min-
Incomplete information imum bounding rectangle, and the ellipse method respectively. The benefits of the pro-
Routing posed strategy in system level are investigated by the simulation studies built upon the
Borman expressway network. The simulation results indicate that as the local travel time
information provision strategy is used, it may save 10–25% of the system travel time result-
ing from global information provision strategy under medium or high network traffic loads.
Moreover, the sensitivity analyses indicate that the merits of the local travel time informa-
tion provision strategy are more significant as the penetration of smart vehicles increases
over the network. Thus, the proposed local information provision strategy outperforms glo-
bal information provision strategy in system level network performance.
Ó 2017 Tongji University and Tongji University Press. Publishing Services by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Introduction

In recent years, advanced communication, sensing, information and computation technologies have been integrated into
transportation infrastructure including cars, traffic signals, roadside sensor units, etc. These new technologies have paved the
path to build up a well-connected transportation system, which enables travelers to access real-time traffic information
through various channels such as radio, mobile phone, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication tech-
nologies. Even though providing more real-time information to travelers will potentially enable strategic online route
choices and lead to better traveling experiences, existing research already noticed that this privilege becomes less as more
travelers are uniformly informed (Seredynski and Grzybek, 2016; Arnott et al., 1991; Du et al., 2015a,b) at the same time. For
example, if a major corridor in an urban road network has severe traffic congestion, all informed vehicles would notice and

Peer review under responsibility of Tongji University and Tongji University Press.
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: sw2h19@hotmail.com (S. Chen), ldu3@iit.edu (L. Du).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijtst.2017.06.003
2046-0430/Ó 2017 Tongji University and Tongji University Press. Publishing Services by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
230 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239

try to avoid it by taking an alternative corridor with the better level of service (LOS). Then, it is very possible that a large
volume of traffic would run into this light traffic corridor in a short time and make it congested soon. And later, thanks
to the update of the real-time traffic information, traffic congestion may shift to another alternative. Therefore, uniformly
providing the same real-time traffic information access to all users may lead to severe congestion oscillation among several
alternative corridors over time and worsen traffic condition in the network level.
This study considers that the above congestion oscillation mainly roots from the combination of the three reasons. (i)
Real-time global traffic information is uniformly provided to all travelers. (ii) Independent routing mechanism is employed
to provide route suggestions for travelers. (iii) Travelers are of the selfish nature to pursue the best paths of their own inter-
ests. Namely, individual travelers seek to find their best routes independently without coordinating with others. A routing
guidance system combining the above features will very likely direct a significant amount of traffic into some light traffic
corridors within a short time period, make them congested, and then move the heavy traffic to other alternatives later.
To address the above issue, existing literature proposes several possible solutions, such as reducing/re-distributing the traffic
demand by strategic land use plan (Kuzmyak, 2012), providing travelers stochastic traffic information to diversify the rout-
ing decisions (Du et al., 2015a,b) or setting up a coordinated routing mechanism so that traffic demand can be evenly dis-
tributed (Du et al., 2014, 2015a,b). These strategies may generate a significant improvement on the system performance but
need a revolutionary change either on current urban network or routing guidance systems.
This study proposes a new solution staying on current urban network and independent routing mechanism. Specifically,
we propose using strategic local real-time traffic information (mainly about travel time) provision rather than current global
traffic information provision to support independent and selfish in-vehicle routing. Namely, this strategy only provides a
traveler the access to local real-time traffic information to search the shortest path of interests. The coverage of the local
traffic information is limited by the minimum bounding rectangle method or the Ellipse method according to each traveler’s
current origin and destination. The local information provision expects to result in diverse route choices among travelers so
that network traffic demand can be well distributed without compromising the traffic mobility of individual users. Accord-
ingly, the congestion oscillation associated to the global information provision can be relieved.
Our simulation studies built upon the Borman expressway network were developed to demonstrate the relative perfor-
mance of the local (travel time) information provision strategy to global (travel time) information strategy in terms of system
travel time. The simulation results indicate that the local information provision strategy may save 10–25% system travel time
resulting from the global information provision strategy under medium or high network traffic load. In addition, the merits
of the local information provision strategy are more significant as the penetration of smart vehicles increases over the net-
work. Thus, given independent and selfish-routing mechanism is used, the proposed local information provision strategy
outperforms the global information provision strategy in the view of reducing system travel time.
In literature, very few research efforts directly investigated the network effect by varying the spatial coverage of informa-
tion provision to individual users, even though a few efforts studied how real-time traffic information provision affects a
user’ route choice behavior. Below reviews the most closely related work. Mahmassani and Jayakrishnan (1991, 1994) tested
the effect of real-time information on user’s route switching behavior in a simple network, and also examined the effect of
the fraction of users equipped with in-vehicle navigation system on network performance in a congested traffic corridor.
Their research indicates that a little additional system wide benefit presented beyond a certain fraction of users which have
the access to information, if vehicles are given the maximum freedom to change their route plan. Thus, more frequently
updating real-time traffic information may not lead to a better system performance. This is consistent to our numerical
experiments given later. Hawas’s research (Hawas, 2012) described a cooperative decentralized architecture for a reactive
real-time route guidance, in which multiple local controllers were allowed to exchange traffic information in their territories.
Their simulation study indicates that increasing the spatial coverage of the information knowledge of local controllers for
searching better individual routes may sometimes cause the deterioration of the system performance on travel time. Their
results indirectly support the significance of the proposed local information provision strategy. The studies of Arnott et al.
(1991) indicate that providing perfect information to drivers may not reduce traffic congestion under various traffic
demands. Han et al. (2006) explored a minimal area for searching the shortest path between a given OD pair to reduce com-
putations. The empirical results suggest that an elliptical shape is the most suitable approach for confining the search area
for seeking the shortest path. This interesting research observation supports the usage of the ellipse method to identify the
coverage of the local information provision strategy for this study. At the meantime, Li and Huang (Li, 2005; Huang and Wu,
2006; Huang et al., 2006; Humblet, 1991) suggested other approaches to scope the searching space for the shortest path
algorithms.
Overall, the review above indicates that limiting individual vehicles’ access to real-time traffic information may potential
improve the system performance. However, we still lack the knowledge on the operational strategy and validation. This sim-
ulation based research seeks to partially make up this gap by proposing a local information provision strategy. This strategy
may be integrated into current data provision mobile Apps. or routing navigation systems. Customers/users can purchase
different levels of information provision services from suppliers. The observations and understandings obtained from this
study will potentially support more strategic information provision methods, which prevent network congestions, save indi-
vidual vehicles’ travel time, and improve the system performance.
The technical details of the proposed research are presented as by the following structure. We first provide the problem
statement, which defines the framework of this study and the necessary assumptions. Then, we demonstrate the approaches
to address local information provision strategy, incomplete information, and sensitivity analysis. Following that, we
 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239 231

introduce the implementation of the simulation, the experiments, and discuss the insights obtained from the experiments.
The whole study and potential future work is summarized at the end of this paper.

Problem statement

This study considers a local network, in which a group of smart vehicles having the access to real-time traffic information
via connected vehicle technologies. During their trips, they can adaptively update their routes according to real-time traffic
information, whose coverage is strategically limited by the proposed local information provision strategy. This study also
considers that smart vehicles will perform rational route choices mainly according to travel time information. In the other
words, a vehicle always chooses the shortest path in terms of travel time. Other factors such as safety, personal habits, the
information accuracy and latency are not considered due to the lack of formulations and data to quantify. Moreover, indi-
vidual smart vehicles independently search the shortest path using local real-time travel time information with a high pri-
ority without cooperation. Historical traffic information is only involved as needed such as when the coverage of real-time
information cannot form a path from the origin to the destination of a traveler. Throughout the paper, traffic information
refers to link travel time information. Accordingly, real-time traffic information refers to the periodically updated link travel
time information; network/system performance refers to network/system total travel time except extra specification is
made.
Under the framework defined above, the simulation studies seek to demonstrate the merit of the local information pro-
vision strategy in terms of system travel time. Next section presents our approaches to implement local information provi-
sion and routing algorithms as well as to address impacts of incomplete information and some sensitive factors.

Methodology

Local information provision

To implement the local information provision strategy, these two key technical questions pop out: what is the rational
coverage of the local information to support route searching and how to scope it? Inspired by existing literature (Han
et al., 2006; Li, 2005; Huang and Wu, 2006), this study considers three different methods, including Minimum Bounded Rect-
angle (MBR), the ellipse method, and k-nearest neighborhood, to identify the coverage of the real-time information provi-
sion. We discuss each of them below in technical details.
MBR method puts the network of interests in an x–y coordinate space and stores the networks by the coordinates of the
nodes and links. Then this study identifies the coverage of the local information provision by the minimum rectangle whose
diagonal is the hypothetic link between the current origin and destination of the trip. The coverage of this rectangle can be
zoomed out by proportionally extending the edges of the minimum rectangle. Accordingly, a link is considered to be covered
by the local information provision strategy if and only if both ends of the link fall in the rectangle (see Eq. (1)). To ensure real-
time travel time information has the priority in routing algorithm, this study sets the travel time of a link outside the cov-
erage as infinite. Along with this idea, the formulation (1) specifies the real-time link travel time as the MBR method is used.


t ij ; if xmin 6 x 6 xmax ; ymin 6 y 6 ymax ; for  ¼ i; j
t 0ij ¼ ; ð1Þ
þ1; o:w:

where t0ij is the travel time on arc (i,j); tij is the real-time travel time on arc (i,j); x , y (for  ¼ i; j) are the coordinates of node i
or j; xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax, are the coordinates of the boundaries of the rectangle. For the minimum rectangle, xmin, ymin, and
xmax, ymax represent the origin and destination nodes.
Ellipse method is another approach used to specify the coverage of the local information provision. It defines the coverage
of the local information provision strategy by an ellipse with a predefined eccentricity, whose foci are the origin and the des-
tination nodes. Clearly, as larger eccentricity is selected, larger local information provision coverage is formed. Moreover, the
definition of ellipse indicates that a node is covered by an ellipse shaped area, if the sum of the distances from the node to the
two foci is less than or equal to the rate of the length of the focal length (i.e., the distance between the origin and destination)
to the eccentricity. Thus, a link is considered to be covered by an ellipse shaped area if the two ends of the link are covered by
the ellipse area (see Eq. (2)). Again, to ensure real-time travel time information has the priority in routing algorithm, this
study sets the travel time of a link outside the coverage as infinite. Accordingly, the formulation in (2) below specifies the
link travel time.
( pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
2
ffi
2
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
ðxD xO Þ þðyD yO Þ
t 0ij ¼ t ij ; if e
P ðx  xO Þ2 þ ðy  yO Þ2 þ ðx  xD Þ2 þ ðy  yD Þ2 ; ¼ i; j ; ð2Þ
þ1 o:w:

where t0ij is the travel time for an arc (i,j) in the coverage; tij is the real-time travel time on arc (i,j); x , y (for  ¼ i; j) are the
coordinates of node i or j; xO , yO are the coordinates of the origin node; xD , yD are the coordinates of destination node; e is the
predefined eccentricity of the ellipse.
232 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239

K-nearest neighborhood (KNN) method is also a possible method that can be used to define the coverage of the local
information provision strategy. This method scopes the coverage of the real-time information provision by a circle area with
the origin node as the center, and the distance from origin node to destination node as the radius. Our experiments show that
this coverage is too large and can hardly work efficiently. Thus it is not used in the simulation experiments.

Incomplete information

It is very possible that the shortest path with a rational length (less than infinite) cannot be found if it only relies on the
local real-time traffic information. This study considers this situation as the incomplete information. To address this issue,
both the passive and adaptive strategies are proposed by involving historical data or enlarging the real-time information pro-
vision coverage respectively. The passive strategy is developed by mimicking travelers’ usual reaction under this situation:
using his/her own experiences to complete the information and find a path. Thus, this passive strategy will take the historical
travel time information for the links out of the coverage so that the shortest route can be searched. Following this strategy,
the infinite travel time in Eqs. (1) and (2) are replaced by the corresponding historical travel time under the case of the
incomplete information.
The adaptive strategy is coincident with the applications of some mobile devices. For the purpose of saving download
bytes, these mobile Apps. tend to download the minimum amount of data to satisfy the applications. If the data plan is pro-
ven to be insufficient, the programs can download more or upgrade to a higher level of information provision service. This
process can be repeated until a route can be searched via real-time traffic information. Our simulation work tested the per-
formance of both strategies.

Sensitivity of information provision strategy

There are several factors such as traffic congestion, penetration, and information update frequency, which may affect the
effect of the proposed local information provision strategy on reducing system travel time. This study tests the sensitivities
of these factors by our simulation studies.
The impact of traffic congestion over network is first tested. It has been recognized that the benefit of the global infor-
mation provision may degrade or vanish as the level of network traffic congestion rises. This study thus wonders how much
traffic congestion will affect the performance of the proposal local information provision strategy. Accordingly, the simula-
tion study explores the system travel time under various traffic loads, which cause sparse, mildly congested and highly con-
gested network traffic conditions.
The effect of the penetration is also tested. It is defined as the percentage of smart vehicles in the network traffic flow.
Note that this study considers the vehicles with the access to real-time traffic information and also comply with it as smart
vehicles. Thus, this sensitivity test implicitly covers the issue related to users’ compliance rate, whose effects have been con-
sidered in literature such as (Huang et al., 2008; Yin and Yang, 2003). This study is interested in exploring the network per-
formance under various smart vehicle penetrations if individual smart vehicles search their shortest paths relying upon the
local information provision strategy.
Last, this study investigates the effect of the information update frequency by the simulation experiments. It is recognized
that vehicles are very likely to make route choices at different times. Then, if the travel time information is updated very
frequently, it will potentially prevent guiding many users to a common route in a short time. Thus, this factor may affect
the effect of the proposed local information strategy on the system performance. Note that the simulation study makes
the information updated frequency consistent to the traffic volume (vehicles) variation rate in the experiments. Namely,
whenever extra traffic volume is put in the network, the real-time traffic information will be updated. Thus, the experiments
provide the travelers the maximum opportunities to switch routes according to the traffic condition variation.

A⁄ routing algorithm

Even though the proposed local information stagey can be implemented under various routing algorithms using deter-
ministic or stochastic travel time information, as our initial study on this topic, the presented simulation considers determin-
istic travel time and applies A⁄ algorithm to search shortest paths for individual travelers. To complete the study, below first
briefly introduces A⁄ algorithm and then presents the justification of using A⁄ algorithm.
A⁄ algorithm is a typical heuristic shortest-path (SP) algorithm. Starting from a specific node of a weighted graph, it con-
structs a tree of paths starting from that node, expanding paths one step at a time, until one of its paths ends at the prede-
termined destination node. At each iteration of its main loop, A⁄ algorithm uses a best-first search strategy to find the least-
cost path from current origin to a destination. More exactly, A⁄ algorithm employs a distance-plus-cost heuristic function,
denoted as f ðni Þ, at a node ni to determine the order of candidate paths in the network. f ðni Þ is a sum of two components,
i.e., f ðni Þ ¼ gðni Þ þ hðni Þ, where gðni Þ is the cost from the origin (starting node) to the current node i and hðni Þ is the heuristic
variable representing a heuristic distance from the current node to the destination. For the algorithm to find the actual short-
est path, hðni Þ must not overestimate the distance from the current node to the destination. Thus, hðni Þ can be the straight-
line distance from the current node to the destination, which is the smallest possible distance between these two nodes. As
 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239 233

2 f(3)=g(3)+h(3) 9
f(6)=g(6)+h(6)
)
h(6
)
1 g(6) h(3 6 8

g(3)
3 4 5 7

Fig. 1. The heuristic variable in A* algorithm. The heuristic variable guarantees the priority of node 6 although the closest node to node 1 is node 3.

an A⁄ algorithm traverses a network to search for the shortest path, it follows a path of the lowest known heuristic cost,
keeping a sorted priority queue of the candidate paths along the way (see the example in Fig. 1). Clearly, the factor of
hðni Þ prevents the target route deviating significantly from the straight line between an origin and a destination. Thus, A⁄
algorithm avoids searching the entire map, which may be too large and cause extra computational load. This good feature
fits the thought of the proposed local information provision strategy, thus, our simulation studies use A⁄ algorithm to search
for the shortest path for individual vehicles.

Simulation study

Road network and input data

This study uses the Borman expressway corridor network to test the effect of the local information provision strategy on
system travel time. The Borman expressway corridor network represents the road network near the junction of I-65 and the
Frank Borman Expressway at Gary, northwest of the state of Indiana. The network, consists of parts of Interstate 80 (I-80), I-
94, and I-65 expressway, has 197 nodes and 460 arcs. It has been used in a few researches regarding to traffic information
provision (Du et al., 2012, 2013). The network topology is shown in Fig. 2.
Besides the network test-bed, the input data of the experiments are given as follows. (i) The users each associated with an
Origin–Destination (OD) are randomly selected in the network. Thus, the traffic demand for each OD is the sum of vehicles
which are assigned to this OD. (ii) Link capacity is randomly generated. (iii) Free flow travel time is generated based on link
capacity and service level C. (iv) Historical traffic condition is generated based on the traffic loads which used in this

Fig. 2. Borman expressway corridor network, the coordinate system are used as a reference in the application of scoping methods.
234 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239

experiments. (v) Background traffic condition (i.e. traffic occupancy on each link before experiments were run) is randomly
generated according to the traffic capacity.

Simulation framework

It is hard to implement the proposed local information provision strategy through existing commercial simulators since it
requires the customized routing and information provision algorithms. Thus, this study builds our own simulation frame-
work, which has the structure given in Fig. 3.
Specifically, the simulation starts from the network initialization including assigning traffic load, step size, penetration,
etc. Then, the background traffic and the traffic load (including both smart and non-smart vehicles) are generated and loaded
to the OD pairs. The number of smart vehicles is specified by the smart vehicle penetration. The non-smart vehicles are rou-
ted by the predefined routes according to free traffic condition. The smart vehicles are routed through A⁄ algorithm, using the
local real-time traffic information and global real-time information respectively. After routing, the experiments measure the
link traffic volume over the network as well as the travel time experienced by the travelers in each OD under the local or
global real-time information provision strategy respectively. Furthermore, the system travel times under different informa-
tion provision strategies are accounted and compared. Note that the link travel time is calculated by BPR function:

Fig. 3. Simulation framework.

 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239 235

"  4 #
V
t ¼ t 0 1 þ 0:15 ; ð3Þ
C

where t is the link travel time; t0 is the free-flow link travel time; V is the traffic volume on the link; C is the link capacity.
This study employs BPR for travel time estimation for the reasons below. First, as shown in Fig. 3, this simulation does not
include microscopic traffic flow model, thus the travel time can only be measured by macroscopic traffic flow. Then, BPR
function is preferred due to its simple format. Second, even though BPR function has been criticized for its accuracy, the sim-
ulation uses it consistently in travel time prediction in A⁄ algorithm as well as the system performance in travel time
throughout the simulation. Thus, it is accurate in this simulation environment and its weakness is minimized. Last, thanks
to its simple mathematical format, it is still widely used in literature for various research interests such as competitive or
dynamic routing (Grzybek et al., 2015; Altman et al., 2002; Kaufman et al., 1998; Lo and Szeto, 2004). Given no other
well-defined formulations in the literature to do the job, this study thinks it is a reasonable option.

Experiment results

This study evaluates the performance of the local information provision strategy by examining the system travel time.
The formulation is given below.
X
Tt ¼ ti f i ; ð4Þ
i

where T t is the total travel time in the network; t i is the travel time on link i; f i is the traffic flow on link i.
Accordingly, the merit of the proposed local information provision to the global information provision is presented by the
ratio of the system travel time under the local information provision strategy to that under the global information provision
strategy. It is given in the formulation below.
Ttp
P¼ ; ð5Þ
Ttg
where P represents the relative performance (i.e., a ratio); Ttp and Tt g are the system travel times as the local or global infor-
mation provision strategies are applied respectively.
The following sections demonstrate the experimental results, which respectively demonstrate the effects of the traffic
load, incomplete information, penetration, and information update frequency on the performance of the local information
provision strategy. Note that the experiments noticed that the simulation results with traffic load below 70,000 (i.e.
50,000–700,000) is similar to the results around the load of 70,000; the simulation results above 100,000 (i.e., 100,000–
110,000) is similar to the results around the load of 100,000. Thus, this study only reports the observations when the traffic
load is between 70,000 and 100,000 vehicles in all the experimental results below. In addition, each experiment is run 20
times to remove the effect of randomness.

Effect of traffic load

These experiments explored the effect of the local information provision strategy on the system performance under dif-
ferent traffic conditions, which were realized in the simulation by varying the traffic load in the testbed from 50,000 to
110,000 vehicles with the step size equal to 5000 vehicles. According to average service level over the network, our exper-
imental results indicate that the network traffic condition is sparse when the traffic load is under 70,000 vehicles, mildly
congested when the traffic load is between 70,000 and 90,000 vehicles, and highly congested as traffic load is over 90,000
vehicles. In addition, to avoid the interference of the smart vehicle penetration, these experiments applied 100% penetration
and a given information frequency. The experiment results are shown in Figs. 4 and 5, which respectively employ MBR or
ellipse method, combined with adaptive strategy to address the issue of incomplete information. The three curves present

1.2
Relave Performance: P

1.1
1
average
0.9
worst case
0.8
best case
0.7
0.6
70 75 80 85 90 95 100
Traffic Load (x1000 Vehicles)
Fig. 4. The relative performance P, adopting adaptive MBR.
236 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239

1.15

Relave Performance: P
1.05

0.95
average
0.85
worst case
0.75
best case
0.65

0.55
70 75 80 85 90 95 100
Traffic Load (x1000 Vehicles)
Fig. 5. The relative performance using adaptive ellipse method.

the worst case, best case and average performance respectively; y axis represents the ratio P and x axis represents the traffic
loads.
Fig. 4 demonstrates that when the testbed is under the sparse traffic condition (i.e., the traffic load is less than 75,000
vehicles), the merit of this local information provision is not significant (see the values of P0 s are about 1 as the traffic load
is less than 75k in Fig. 4). However, as more vehicles are loaded into the network and traffic congestion starts, the benefit of
the local information provision for reducing system travel time from global information provision dramatically increases
(see the values of P0 s become smaller as the traffic load is above 75k in Fig. 4). As a traffic load of 100,000 vehicles is put
in the testbed, the system travel time resulting from the local information provision strategy is about 75% of that under
the global information provision strategy. Thus the benefit slightly passes 25% (1–75%). These experimental results indicate
that as the traffic load increases, the traffic congestion increases, and then vehicles will explore the shortest paths more
aggressively. In this context, if the global traffic information is provided, the traffic volume will increase quickly and signif-
icantly on the links which are reported as freeway/non-congested traffic condition. As a result, traffic congestion may happen
in these corridors. On the other hand, our local information provision can diverse information access, and then lead to dif-
ferent route choices which benefit traffic congestion reduction, i.e., better system performance.
Moreover, Fig. 4 shows that when the traffic load is relatively light (70,000 vehicles or less), the performance of the local
information provision among the worst, average and best cases is not apparently different. However, as the traffic load is
between 75,000 and 95,000 vehicles, the performance varies under different runs. After the traffic load is above 95,000 vehi-
cles, the results under worst, best and the average approach closely again. This phenomenon suggests that when the traffic is
very sparse and congested, local information provision performs uniformly since the system travel time only has limited
space to improve. However, as the traffic congestion is moderate, the merit of local information provision on the system tra-
vel time reduction may fluctuate according to various traffic flow distributions over the network. Equally important, the
experimental results indicate that the worst, average and best cases show the same trend across the sparse, moderate
and congested traffic scenarios, which demonstrate the merit of the local provision strategy in general.
Fig. 5 demonstrates the similar observations as we have from Fig. 4, but the experiments used adaptive ellipse method.
The maximum system time reduction by applying the MBR and ellipse methods are both around 25%. Thus, we state that the
local information provision strategy performs similarly as adaptive MBR or ellipse method is used. Furthermore, Eqs. (1) and
(2) indicate that MBR approach can identify if a link is covered by the local information provision easier and faster than the
ellipse method. Thus, MBR approach is recommended.

Effect of incomplete information

This study noticed that the incomplete information happened more often when the ellipse rather than the MBR method
was used to identify the coverage of the local information provision, due to the grid structure of the testbed. Thus, this sec-
tion mainly presents the related results by using the ellipse method. Figs. 5 and 6 demonstrate the simulation results respec-
tively using adaptive and passive strategies to address the incomplete information issue. Comparing their results, it is
noticed that using adaptive strategy (i.e. enlarging the coverage of the information provision adaptively when an incomplete
information provision occurs) will lead a better system performance than using the passive strategy (using historical travel
time data). For example, under the traffic load of 100,000 vehicles, Figs. 5 and 6 show that the experiment using adaptive
strategy will lead to about 25% system travel time reduction, but the experiment using passive strategy will only result in
6% system travel time reduction. This similar observation can be observed under most of other experiments with different
traffic loads, except the ones with very low traffic load (i.e., sparse traffic condition). With this knowledge, the study mainly
presented the results using adaptive strategy in the following experiments.

Effect of penetration
This test investigated the sensitivity of the proposed local information provision strategy to the smart vehicle penetration.
The experiments were conducted under the traffic load equal to 80; 000 vehicles, and the penetration of smart vehicles
 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239 237

1.02

Relave Performance: P
1

0.98
Average
0.96 Worst case
Best case
0.94

0.92
70 75 80 85 90 95 100
Traffic Flow (x1000 Vehicles)
Fig. 6. The relative performance using passive ellipse method.

varied from 10% to 100% with the step size equal to 10%. Each experiment was also run 20 times to remove the effect of ran-
domness. Both the MBR and ellipse methods were used to identify the coverage of the local information provision. We com-
pared the system travel time as smart vehicles were provided the global or local real-time travel time information.
The results in Fig. 7 indicate that increasing the penetration will strengthen the merit of the local information provision
strategy to the global information provision. Even though the merit is not apparent under low penetration scenarios, but it
keeps increasing and leads to 10% of the system travel time reduction as the penetration reaches 100% (you can see the sys-
tem travel time under the local information provision strategy is 90% of that under the global information provision strategy
in Fig. 7). Therefore, as a majority of the traffic flow is composed of smart vehicles, the local information provision strategy
leads to more system travel time reduction from using the global information provision. Recall that the global information
provision strategy only performs well under a low smart vehicle penetration. These experimental results show the merit of
the local information provision strategy from another view. Also, it is observed that MBR and ellipse methods perform
evenly.

Effect of information update frequency

The experiments in this section investigated the effect of the information update frequency on the performance of the
local information provision strategy. Our experiments updated the link travel time information by a frequency coincident
to the rate of the traffic condition change in the network. More exactly, during the simulation time period, this study uni-
formly increased the traffic load in the testbed with a step size a (i.e., a the percentage of the total traffic load was loaded at
each step); and then updated the traffic condition accordingly. Within an interval of refreshing information, traffic informa-
tion kept constant. Then, the step size a reflects the update frequency of the traffic information during the simulation. A
smaller a corresponds to a more frequent information update. Specifically, this tests put 1,000,000 vehicles in total into
the network by the batch of a * 1,000,000 vehicles in each step. The real time traffic information was updated whenever
the a * 1,000,000 number of vehicles were put into the network. Previous experiments indicated that the MBR method
and the ellipse method performed evenly, thus this experiment only used the MBR method.

Fig. 7. The effect of penetration under adaptive MBR (left) and ellipse (right).
238 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239

1.05
1 0.1

Relave Performance: P
1
0.95
0.9
0.85
0.8
0.75
0.7
70 75 80 85 90 95 100
Traffic Load (x1000 Vehicles)
Fig. 8. The effect of information update frequencies.

The experiment results given in Fig. 8 show that the local information provision strategy performs evenly under the
scenarios of a = 0.1 and a = 1. Note that a = 0.1 refers to the scenarios which experienced more frequent traffic load variation,
thus had more frequent information update. Hence, this study states that higher information update frequency won’t lead to
more merits of the local information provision strategy in terms of reducing system travel time.

Conclusion and future work

This research developed a local information provision strategy to address network traffic congestion oscillation (many
vehicles running to one (and another) light traffic corridors time by time), which may occur when many vehicles are uni-
formly provided the global real-time traffic information and follow an independent selfish routing guidance. The local infor-
mation provision strategy will potentially lead to a diversified information access among information users, and accordingly
diversify route choices, which will potentially avoid the traffic congestion oscillation. The proposed information provision
strategy can be implemented by the MBR (or ellipse) method, which identifies the spatial information provision coverage,
and route researching algorithms A⁄, which searches the shortest paths for users with the given information provision.
Simulation experiments based on the Borman network were conducted to test the performance of our information pro-
vision strategy under different traffic conditions, penetrations and information update frequencies. Based on our experiment
results, we can draw the following conclusions:

1. Under light traffic load, the merit of the local information provision strategy is not significant or its performance is even
slightly worse than the global information provision under some cases in terms of system travel time reduction. This
result makes sense since the global information will help users to find the best paths overall network without causing
traffic congestion under sparse traffic condition.
2. Under medium to heavy traffic load conditions, the local information provision strategy significantly improves system
performance. On the average, it reduces 10–25% of the system time as the global information provision is implemented
in the experiments. Even in the worst cases under different traffic loads, the proposed local information provision strategy
shows its advantages to the global information provision in terms of system travel time reduction. Therefore, the exper-
iment results indicate the potential value of the local information provision strategy to relief congestions under medium
and high traffic loads.
3. The benefit of the local information provision strategy also demonstrates the significance as the smart vehicle penetration
is relatively high. If more vehicles/users can have the access to the real-time traffic information provision service and
trust it, the effect of this strategy would be more positive. Therefore, before the application of this strategy, it may be bet-
ter to investigate the portion of users and their trustiness in the information service.
4. The MBR and ellipse methods have no significant difference in the performance of the proposed local information provi-
sion strategy. However, the MBR is recommended in application, due to the lower computation complexity.
5. The experiment suggested that more frequent real-time information refresh won’t lead to extra benefit by using the local
information strategy even when the information update frequency and traffic condition variation rate coincides.

Overall, the research revealed a potential solution to relief the traffic congestion through strategic real-time traffic infor-
mation provision under medium and high network traffic loads. As the development of the automobile industry, it can be
expected that traffic loads in urban road networks will be heavier than ever before. Like the case today that many drivers
rely on onboard GPS to decide their routes, as the developing of the connected vehicle systems, the new generation of drivers
is predictably tended to use and trust the information services. Under this background, this research has its values to provide
a perspective on the issues of real-time traffic information services. It may lead to a systemic impact on current thoughts of
traffic information provision service developments.
 S. Chen, L. Du / International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology 6 (2017) 229–239 239

This is our first attempt to study this innovative idea. Several promising research can be further developed. First, more
comprehensive factors such as fuel consumption, emission, etc. rather than only travel time can be integrated into the route
choice decision of users so that we can make the simulation framework reflect reality better, and also investigate more com-
prehensive insights. Second, it is meaningful to implement this innovative idea based on field data and conduct comprehen-
sive statistical analysis so that we can understand the merit of the local information provision strategy more precisely. We
will explore these interesting topics in our future study.

Acknowledgments

This research is partially supported by the National Science Foundation awards: CMMI 1436786 and CMMI 1554559.

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