Fastest Path Determination at Lane Granularity using a Vehicle-to-Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2V2I) Intelligent Transportation System Architecture

Abstract – In this paper, I describe the vehicle-to-vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2V2I) architecture, which is a hybrid of the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) architectures. The V2V2I architecture leverages the benefits of fast queries and responses from the V2I architecture, but with the advantage of a distributed architecture lacking a single point-of-failure from the V2V architecture. In the V2V2I architecture, the transportation network is broken into zones in which a single vehicle is known as the Super Vehicle. A zone can be as granular as desired, though in this paper I assume that the zones consist of sections of a freeway or individual lanes of sections of a freeway. Only Super Vehicles are able to communicate with the central infrastructure or with other Super Vehicles, and all other vehicles can only communicate with the Super Vehicle responsible for the zone in which they are currently traversing. I represent the freeway system as a graph with edges consisting of sections of a freeway system and the weights of the edges being determined by the amount of time to traverse that section of the freeway with current speeds. The edges could be individual lanes or aggregations of multiple lanes. I perform an analysis using FreeSim to determine how accurate the represented freeway system is when a different number of edges comprises a zone, in addition to determining the difference in the time to traverse fastest paths when lanes are considered as opposed to merely using an average speed of all of the lanes to determine the weight of an edge