Fastest path analysis in a vehicle-to-infrastructure intelligent transportation system architecture

In this paper, I perform an analysis of the time to traverse shortest paths compared to the time to traverse fastest paths as determined from a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) architecture. Vehicle tracking devices have been installed in 15 vehicles that frequent the University of Alaska, Anchorage on a daily basis. This data has been fed into FreeSim (http://www.freewaysimulator.com) to determine the fastest path from the university to a location on the other side of the city. Two different vehicles traversed the fastest path and shortest path, respectively, each day of the week to determine the actual amount of time to traverse the paths. Although the fastest path did prove to be faster the majority of the time, there were some days for which the shortest path was ultimately faster than the calculated fastest path. I provide an analysis of these paths and analyze reasons as to why this may be the case.