Reaching destination on time with cooperative intelligent transportation systems

Abstract

Research on intelligent transportation systems is so far focussed on decreasing the travel time of vehicles and avoiding congestions. However, the importance of reaching on time is different for different vehicles and depends upon the purpose of the journey. In a human-operated queue, it is generally considered courteous to give priority to people running very late. They may be running late to catch a flight or may be in an emergency for a medical check-up. There is a very small discomfort to the other people as long as the number of people in an emergency and running late is low. However, such prioritization is an invaluable help to the people running late. In this paper the same behaviour is modelled, wherein the transportation system is made biased towards the vehicles on an important task and running late. The paper presents the mechanism by which a vehicle may judge its running status, decide whether to ask for cooperation and decide how much of cooperation to ask for. The vehicle lane changes and traffic lights operating policy are made cooperative. Experimental results show that such a cooperation leads to lesser number of important vehicles reaching their destinations late.