A Simulation Study of Route Selection with Inter-Vehicle Communication

Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) is a promising technology for the next-generation of auto industry, In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of an IVC application for route selection, First we develop a traffic simulator based on a microscopic traffic now model using cellular automata, Our simulation environment is a simple two-way road with traffic signals, We implement four route selection methods, They are an IVC-based route selection method, a Memory-based route selection method without traffic information, a centralized traffic information-based route selection method like Vehicle Information and Communication System (VICS), and a random route selection method, Next we examine the effectiveness of each method under various settings, Simulation results show that traffic information plays an important role in traffic congestion avoidance, The traffic, however, becomes heavier as the number of vehicles using the centralized traffic information increases. On the other hand, the traffic flow becomes smoother as the number of vehicles using IVC increases. Simulation results also show that the use of IVC does not cause the disturbance of the whole traffic flow. We show that IVC has a possibility of resolving the difficulties of VICS and social traffic problems.