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Reducing vehicle emissions and fuel consumption in the city by using particle swarm optimization

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Abstract

Nowadays, the increasing levels of polluting emissions and fuel consumption of the road traffic in modern cities directly affect air quality, the city economy, and especially the health of citizens. Therefore, improving the efficiency of the traffic flow is a mandatory task in order to mitigate such critical problems. In this article, a Swarm Intelligence approach is proposed for the optimal scheduling of traffic lights timing programs in metropolitan areas. By doing so, the traffic flow of vehicles can be improved with the final goal global target of reducing their fuel consumption and gas emissions (CO and N O x ). In this work we optimize the traffic lights timing programs and analyze their effect in pollution by following the standard HBEFA as the traffic emission model. Specifically, we focus on two large and heterogeneous urban scenarios located in the cities of Malaga and Seville (in Spain). When compared to the traffic lights timing programs designed by experts close to real ones, the proposed strategy obtains significant reductions in terms of the emission rates (23.3 % CO and 29.3 % N O x ) and the total fuel consumption.

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Notes

  1. Source: Sistema de Indicadores Urbanos Agenda 21. page 18. Observatorio de Medio Ambiente Urbano. Ayto. 2008. Málaga

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Acknowledgments

Authors acknowledge funds from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MEC) and FEDER under contract TIN2011-28194 (RoadMe project http://roadme.lcc.uma.es). This work is also partially founded by project number 8.06/5.47.4142 in collaboration with the VSB-Technical University of Ostrava. A.C. Olivera acknowledges CONICET and the ANPCyT for Grant PICT 2011-0639.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral, Caleta Olivia 9011, Santa Cruz, Argentina

    A. C. Olivera

  2. University of Málaga, Informática, Málaga, 29071, Spain

    J. M. García-Nieto & E. Alba

  3. VSB-Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic

    E. Alba

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  1. A. C. Olivera
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  2. J. M. García-Nieto
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  3. E. Alba
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Correspondence to A. C. Olivera.

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Olivera, A.C., García-Nieto, J.M. & Alba, E. Reducing vehicle emissions and fuel consumption in the city by using particle swarm optimization. Appl Intell 42, 389–405 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-014-0604-3

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