Smoothing Speed Variability in Age-Friendly Urban Traffic Management.

Traffic congestion has a negative impact on vehicular mobility, especially for senior drivers. Current approaches to urban traffic management focus on adaptive routing for the reduction of fuel consumption and travel time. Most of these approaches do not consider age-friendliness, in particular that speed variability is difficult for senior drivers. Frequent stop and go situations around congested areas are tiresome for senior drivers and make them prone to accidents. Moreover, senior drivers’ mobility is affected by factors such as travel time, surrounding vehicles’ speed, and hectic traffic. Age-friendly traffic management needs to consider speed variability in addition to drivers’ waiting time (which impacts fuel consumption and travel time). This paper introduces a multi-agent pheromone-based vehicle routing algorithm that smooths speed variability while also considering senior drivers during traffic light control. Simulation results demonstrate 17.6% improvement in speed variability as well as reducing travel time and fuel consumption by 11.6% and 19.8% respectively compared to the state of the art.