A congestion-free vehicle route reservation architecture

Transportation research is mainly focused on answering the question of how to eliminate traffic congestion over large scale areas. Inasmuch as a large portion of big cities suffers from traffic congestion with severe (in many cases) consequences on personal mobility. Drawbacks of congestion include driver delay and frustration, higher fuel consumption, air pollution and financial losses (in terms of man-hours lost on working days). Congestion has, traditionally, been a difficult problem to tackle since traffic demand fluctuates dynamically. The major cause of congestion is that a portion of the network is conferred to accommodate higher number of vehicles than its actual capacity. Nonetheless, congestion usually occurs due to lack of an efficient management of transport network utilization and not because demand exceeds network's capacity [1]. Therefore, it is possible to alleviate congestion if vehicles are more effectively distributed over the entire network achieving better load balancing.