Reducing Emissions Prioritising Transport Utility

The regulation of mobility and traffic for the transportation of goods and the movement of people is one of the key issues local authorities are faced with, especially in large urban areas. The aim is to provide efficient mobility services that allow people the freedom to move within their cities as well as to facilitate the distribution of goods. However, the provisioning of transportation services should go in line with other general objectives, like reducing emissions and having more healthy living environments. In this context, we argue that one way to achieve objectives is to limit the use of transportation infrastructure elements and to assign the corresponding resources dynamically and in a prioritised manner to the traffic activities that have a higher utility from the point of view of the society, that is, activities that i) produce less pollution and ii) provide more value to society. Different mechanisms that restrict and control the access to an urban area based on pollution levels in that area are already in use in cities such as Madrid or London, but their level of dynamicity and adaptiveness is limited. In this paper we go beyond these approaches, and propose a prioritised access control approach that is highly dynamic, specific to individual vehicles, and that considers social utility or transportation efficiency. We provide a general model for our approach and instantiate it on a use case for last-mile delivery. We accomplish several experiments using the SUMO traffic simulation tool, to evaluate our proposal.