Segment travel time route guidance strategy in advanced traveler information systems

In this paper, a segment travel time route guidance strategy was proposed in advanced traveler information systems. The route guidance information provided to the vehicles is the sum of travel time on equally divided segments. To evaluate its performance, the new strategy was compared with three other strategies in three different two-route scenarios based on the Nagel–Schreckenberg cellular automaton model. First, four strategies were applied to a symmetrical two-route scenario. The simulation results show that the smaller the segment length is, the greater the average flow will be. The more vehicles that choose roads based on the new strategy, the shorter the average travel time will be. There exists a optimal segment length for each the ratio of dynamic vehicles Sdyn which makes the travel time shortest. Second, in a symmetrical two-route scenario with a permanent bottleneck, results show that zero state and oscillation state were observed. When the bottleneck length more than 1000 cells, the oscillation state disappears. Finally, in a symmetrical two-route scenario with a temporary bottleneck, results show that when the inflow is high, the traffic network with Sdyn=0.5 is better than the one with Sdyn=0. When inflow is low, the situation is just opposite.