Cloud Application for Road Traffic Re-Routing to Evade Traffic Congestion: A Review

The advances in cloud computing and web of things have provided a promising chance to resolve the challenges caused by the increasing transport management problems, chief among them traffic congestion. In recent years, most major metropolises across the world have witnessed a rapid growth in the number of vehicles on the cities' road networks. Accompanied by an underdeveloped road infrastructure, especially in developing countries, increasing traffic volume leads to recurrent traffic congestion which is detrimental to social and economic growth of any country. Traffic congestion has become a worldwide phenomenon with far reaching consequences; chief among them untimely and unwarranted loss of human life, valuable property and revenue. Owing to the significant negative impact of traffic congestion, dealing with traffic congestion has received considerable attention. Increasing road capacity in an attempt to decongest the road networks of major metropolises has been rendered unsustainable since it requires significant investments in new road infrastructure, which is pricey, time consuming and practically impossible due to limited space. Against this background, a number of cloud-based applications have been proposed and designed for traffic control and management in order to effectively deal with congestion in a more sustainable manner. This paper presents a review of research on cloud-based traffic re-routing systems with an intention to unveil the existing novel applications developed to deal with the topical problem in question and to establish potential future direction of research.