A Novel Comprehensive VANET-based Congestion Pricing Zone Management System

Traffic congestion is one of the crucial problems in major cities not only for driversand passengers but also for government and city council to surmount such issue. Afteranalysis for decades, through suggested and applied ideas, congestion pricing definedas the best solution to efficiently alleviate the congestion in a designated area.Although congestion pricing provides various benefits among implemented systemsaround the world, nevertheless there are problems remaining and a comprehensivesystem is missing. In this particular, utilization of Vehicular ad-hoc Network (VANET)for design a pervasive congestion pricing system can solve majority of existingproblems. This study aims to design a novel VANET-based Congestion Pricing Zone(CPZ) management model in order to solve mainstream existing problems in threecategories namely traffic problems, systems scheme deficiencies and technologiesweaknesses. The functionality of proposed model is based on four phases containing 1-Initialization and verification, 2- Charging (Payment), 3- Routing and 4- Violationenforcement. Since this proposed model is a comprehensive system, certainly it aims toachieve various objectives such as optimizing traffic flow at the CPZ’s boundary areawith aid of our proposed intelligent spill-over aware routing algorithm for navigatingvehicles. Likewise, not only to increase accuracy rate of violation enforcement but alsoto boost reliability level of communication task with utilization of Dedicated ShortRange Communication (DSRC). Moreover, providing a user friendly system which isboth simple to understand and easy to interact for users. Last but not least, deploymentof VANET-based scheme brings the possibility of applying a flexible and scalablemodel that makes the chance of modifying or expanding the charging area less costlyand easier in compare with existing systems.

Keywords:

Congestion Pricing , Traffic Congestion , Vehicular ad Hoc Network (VANET) , Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)