Utility of Traffic Information in Dynamic Routing: Is Sharing Information Always Useful?

Abstract

Real-time traffic information can be utilized to enhance the efficiency of transportation networks by dynamically updating routing plans to mitigate traffic jams. However, an interesting question is whether the network coordinator should broadcast real-time traffic information to all network users or communicate it selectively to some of them. Which option enhances the network efficiency more? In this work, we demonstrate using simulation experiments that sharing real-time traffic information with all network users is sub-optimal, and it is actually better to share the information with a majority subset of the total population in order to improve the overall network performance. This result is valid under the assumption that each network user decides its route to destination locally.