Cooperative Traffic Dispersion through Rerouting of Connected and Automated Vehicles in Urban Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel cost function to be embedded in a distributed algorithm for cooperative rerouting of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in urban networks. The computation is performed by intersection units managing the portion of the network for which they are in charge by sending updated routes to follow to the CAVs there. Moreover, the intersection units communicate among each other to be updated on the situation of the (in general nonhomogeneous) links of the network. The proposed approach allows the decomposition of the problem into subproblems, which are resolved distributively with little information exchange. The problems are constructed to obtain a fair compromise between user equilibrium and system optimum, taking advantage of the strengths and coping with the limitations of both. We 1) show the results obtained by running simulations with CAVs on the Sioux Falls network compared with a baseline scenario; 2) analyze the results obtained with different penetration rates of CAVs; and 3) provide a sensitivity analysis to investigate how parameters in our approach affect the results of the experiments.