Background
With over 50 million cars registered in Germany, traffic is an everyday challenge for millions of travellers. However, if everybody is driving the same route, traffic congestion leads to longer travel times for everyone involved. This can be tackled by strategic routing, where (re)routing recommendations are distributed by traffic authorities and taken into account by the drivers' navigation systems. This central coordination will lead to faster, greener and safer traffic.
To this end, we want to help develop new smart traffic and navigation services. By analyzing real-time traffic data and predicting the traffic situation, we can avoid that road users get stuck regularly in traffic through real-time coordinated traffic management and navigation advice. This rerouting can be achieved, for instance, by offering toll discount vouchers to encourage drivers to choose an alternative route.
Challenge
Our industry partner TomTom is involved in the project Socrates 2.0, which is a pan-European project that brings together road authorities, service providers and car manufacturers. The cities involved in this project collect traffic data which can be used for computing strategic routes. Therefore, the cities want to manually predefine traffic density scenarios which are then executed. The rerouting recommendations should be chosen such that the general traffic flow is optimized.