Towards a prioritised use of transportation infrastructures: the case of vehicle-specific dynamic access restrictions to city centres

• Main Authors: Billhardt, Holger, Fernández, Alberto, Martí, Pasqual, Tejedor, Javier Prieto, Ossowski, Sascha
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 22-01-2024
• Subjects: Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence; Physics - Physics and Society
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.12329

Electronics, Volume 11, Issue 4 (2022) One of the main problems that local authorities of large cities have to face
is the regulation of urban mobility. They need to provide the means to allow
for the efficient movement of people and distribution of goods. However, the
provisioning of transportation services needs to take into account general
global objectives, like reducing emissions and having more healthy living
environments, which may not always be aligned with individual interests. Urban
mobility is usually provided through a transport infrastructure that includes
all the elements that support mobility. On many occasions, the capacity of the
elements of this infrastructure is lower than the actual demand and thus
different transportation activities compete for their use. In this paper, we
argue that scarce transport infrastructure elements should be assigned
dynamically and in a prioritised manner to transport activities that have a
higher utility from the point of view of society; for example, activities that
produce less pollution and provide more value to society. In this paper, we
define a general model for prioritizing the use of a particular type of
transportation infrastructure element called time-unlimited elements, whose
usage time is unknown a priori, and illustrate its dynamics through two use
cases: vehicle-specific dynamic access restriction in city centres (i) based on
the usage levels of available parking spaces and (ii) to assure sustained
admissible air quality levels in the city centre. We carry out several
experiments using the SUMO traffic simulation tool to evaluate our proposal.