Efficient Traffic Routing with Progress Guarantees

Stefan Blumer, Manuel Eichelberger, Roger Wattenhofer

Abstract: This paper presents an efficient traffic scheduling algorithm for vehicles such as cars, trains or ships. We provide guarantees for deadlock and starvation freedom, therefore ensuring progress for each vehicle in the system. Our method tolerates vehicles which do not disappear from the traffic network once they reach their destination, but rather continue towards subsequent destinations. Therefore, vehicles can run indefinitely. We introduce the concept of "safe spots", which are locations where a vehicle can stop without ever blocking another vehicle. Using such safe spots, we divide routes into short segments, which reduces the number of routing alternatives exponentially, thus allowing real-time traffic allocation.