Application of vehicular communications for improving the efficiency of traffic in urban areas

This paper studies the impacts of vehicular communications on efficiency of traffic in urban areas. We consider a Green Light Optimized Speed Advisory (GLOSA) application implementation in a typical reference area, and present the results of its performance analysis using an integrated cooperative ITS simulation platform. In addition, we study route alternation using Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communications. Our interest was to monitor the impacts of these applications on fuel and traffic efficiency by introducing metrics for average fuel consumption, average stop time behind a traffic light and average trip time, respectively. For gathering the results we implemented two traffic scenarios defining routes through an urban area including traffic lights. The simulations are varied for different penetration rates of application-equipped vehicles, drivers compliance to the advised speed and traffic density. Our results indicate that GLOSA systems could improve fuel consumption, reduce traffic congestion in junctions and the total trip time.