How Routing Strategies Impact Urban Emissions

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TitleHow Routing Strategies Impact Urban Emissions
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsCornacchia, G, Böhm, M, Mauro, G, Nanni, M, Pedreschi, D, Pappalardo, L
Conference NameProceedings of the 30th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number9781450395298
AbstractNavigation apps use routing algorithms to suggest the best path to reach a user's desired destination. Although undoubtedly useful, navigation apps' impact on the urban environment (e.g., CO2 emissions and pollution) is still largely unclear. In this work, we design a simulation framework to assess the impact of routing algorithms on carbon dioxide emissions within an urban environment. Using APIs from TomTom and OpenStreetMap, we find that settings in which either all vehicles or none of them follow a navigation app's suggestion lead to the worst impact in terms of CO2 emissions. In contrast, when just a portion (around half) of vehicles follow these suggestions, and some degree of randomness is added to the remaining vehicles' paths, we observe a reduction in the overall CO2 emissions over the road network. Our work is a first step towards designing next-generation routing principles that may increase urban well-being while satisfying individual needs.
URLhttps://doi.org/10.1145/3557915.3560977
DOI10.1145/3557915.3560977