The Q-Route route guidance concept was developed with the objective of providing drivers with comprehensive and traffic responsive route guidance to address-specific network destinations within a large urban area. The traffic-responsive aspect of Q-Route is implemented using a macro level routing, which can consider historic and/or realtime traffic volume and capacity estimates on all roads in the control area. In the autonomous mode, macro routings, which reflect recurring congestion, are implemented on a time-of-day basis. However, a communication link is required to have realtime routings that respond to nonrecurring congestion. The driver is delivered to address-specific network destinations using a micro level routing, which considers only the local streets within the immediate vicinity of the driver's final destination and is invoked automatically once the driver's destination zone is reached. The combined macro/micro routing procedure is transparent to the user/driver. The prime objective of this paper is to describe the Q-Route route guidance concept and to indicate how the system can be integrated with traffic control models to provide consistent routing information through several compatible driver information subsystems. In addition, the paper illustrates the prototype implementation of the in-vehicle subsystem of the Q-Route prototype, which was tested in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Abstract