TOP: Optimizing vehicle driving speed with vehicle trajectories for travel time minimization and road congestion avoidance

Traffic congestion control is pivotal for intelligent transportation systems. Previous works optimize vehicle speed for different objectives such as minimizing fuel consumption and minimizing travel time. However, they overlook the possible congestion generation in the future (e.g., in 5 minutes), which may degrade the performance of achieving the objectives. In this article, we propose a vehicle Trajectory-based driving speed OPtimization strategy (TOP) to minimize vehicle travel time and meanwhile avoid generating congestion. Its basic idea is to adjust vehicles' mobility to alleviate road congestion globally. TOP has a framework for collecting vehicles' information to a central server, which calculates the parameters depicting the future road condition (e.g., driving time, vehicle density, and probability of accident). Based on the collected information, the central server also measures the friendship among the vehicles and considers the delay caused by red traffic signals to help estimating the vehicle density of the road segments. The server then formulates a noncooperative Stackelberg game considering these parameters, in which when each vehicle aims to minimize its travel time, the road congestion is also proactively avoided. After the Stackelberg equilibrium is reached, the optimal driving speed for each vehicle and the expected vehicle density that maximizes the utilization of the road network are determined. Our real trace analysis confirms some characteristics of vehicle mobility to support the design of TOP. Extensive trace-driven experiments show the effectiveness and superior performance of TOP in comparison with other driving speed optimization methods.