An information discounting routing strategy for advanced traveler information systems

Although there is a lot of enthusiasm and hope that in-vehicle information and route guidance systems will become an integral part of the solution to the traffic congestion problem, there are still a lot of technological and other problems that need to be addressed before such systems operate successfully. This paper examines design aspects of advanced traveler information systems (ATIS) such as frequency of information update, location of information nodes and, most importantly, approaches to estimate the travel times for use in routing decisions and suggestions. In particular, a routing strategy based on information discounting for travel time projection is developed. The importance of the above issues and their implications on the effectiveness of ATIS are demonstrated with a small network.