A SUMO based evaluation of road incidents´ impact on traffic congestion level in smart cities

Recently, the increasing road traffic congestion has attracted a lot of attention from the research community aiming at proposing innovative solutions to reduce the huge economic loss incurred by this problem. In this paper, we first evaluate the impact of random road incidents on the commuters travel time and the overall traffic congestion level under several scenarios, and provide comprehensive analysis of the obtained evaluation results. Then, we propose an extension of the open source traffic simulator SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) to enable real-time vehicles re-routing, to bypass the blocked road due to an incident, by updating their predefined static routes during simulation runtime. The proposed re-routing mechanism has been implemented and the obtained results have proven its high efficiency on reducing the commuters travel time, in case of accident, compared to the basic SUMO.