Exploring a Novel Electrical-Modeling-Based Route Planning for Vehicle Guidance

This work describes a novel Electrical-Modeling-Based Route Planner (EMBRP) for vehicle guidance within city street networks (maps), which uses an equivalent linear electrical circuit considering traffic flow direction, length, and other physical attributes of the streets as parameters for the mathematical model of the circuit branch resistances. Thus, modeling a city as an electrical circuit results in a system of linear equations, which are solved using a multifrontal method implemented in the Unsymmetric Multifrontal Pack (UMFPACK) library. In addition, a Modified Local Current Comparison Algorithm (MLCCA) is proposed with the aim to find a suitable route meeting the correct traffic flow direction. The EMBRP has the functionality to accept user-defined symbolic models in terms of street parameters extracted from a public database allowing different route planning applications. For instance, low-risk route planning schemes can be explored also routes with multiple origins and a single destination can be plotted using only a single simulation, among other possibilities. The EMBRP is illustrated through the description of nine real case studies. According to the obtained results, suitable planning routes and small computing times are achieved by this proposal. A performance comparison, in terms of memory consumption and computing time, among EMBRP, the heuristic A∗ algorithm and Hspice numeric engine is presented. The smallest computing time was achieved by the EMBRP. The EMBRP can be useful for engineers and researchers studying route planning techniques and new street models for specific applications.