Vehicle Routing to Mitigate Human Exposure to Traffic-Related Air Pollutants

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) technology often aims at improving traffic safety and mobility. In recent years, a number of ITS applications have also been developed to reduce environmental impacts from greenhouse gases and pollutant emissions. Typical eco-friendly ITS applications (e.g., eco-routing) focus on reducing overall vehicle emissions. However, pollutant emissions from vehicles would cause more adverse impacts on public health where there are more population living closer to the emission sources (i.e., roadways). To date, eco-friendly ITS applications have not been developed from a pollutant exposure point of view. In this paper, we introduce a new vehicle routing method that goes beyond minimizing overall pollutant emissions; instead, we aim to minimize pollutant exposure to the localized population along the roadways. As part of the method, the human inhaled mass of pollutants is modeled and used as part of the routing cost. Modeling results show that the inhaled mass of fine particulate matter for the selected susceptible population can be reduced by approximately 30% - 80% on a typical workday with the implementation of the proposed vehicle routing method.