Decentralized Optimization of Vehicle Route Planning - A Cross-City Comparative Study

The introduction of connected and autonomous vehicles enables new possibilities in vehicle routing: Knowing the origin and destination of each vehicle in the network can allow for coordinated real-time routing of the vehicles to optimize network performance. However, this relies on individual vehicles being “altruistic,” i.e., willing to accept alternative less-preferred routes. We conduct a study to compare different levels of agent altruism in decentralized vehicles coordination and the effect on the network-level traffic performance. This work introduces novel load-balancing scenarios of traffic flow in real-world cities for varied levels of agent altruism. We show evidence that the new decentralized optimization router is more effective with networks of high load.