Centralised Vehicle Routing for Optimising Urban Traffic: A Scalability Perspective

In the light of revolutionary technologies such as connected autonomous vehicles, centralised vehicle (or traffic) routing is attracting a growing interest as an effective method to tackle traffic congestion in urban areas, which causes enormous economic losses. Whereas potential benefits of centralised vehicle routing techniques are huge, they are not yet mature enough to be deployed in (large) urban areas. The major issue preventing their deployment being the lack of scalability.This position paper provides an all encompassing discussion around how the scalability issue for centralised vehicle (traffic) routing approaches might be addressed. In particular, we elaborate on how the model of the environment (the road network and the traffic) can be reasonably abstracted to allow simplified yet meaningful reasoning. Then, we provide an overview of relevant classes of decision-making techniques and elaborate how they can be applied to tackle the problem. At the end, we present our perspective on how different types of decision-making techniques can be effectively combined such that they can deal with the scalability issue while maintaining reasonable quality of assigned routes.