Dynamic traffic congestion pricing and electric vehicle charging management system for the internet of vehicles in smart cities

The integration of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) in future smart cities could help solve many traffic-related challenges, such as reducing traffic congestion and traffic accidents. Various congestion pricing and electric vehicle charging policies have been introduced in recent years. Nonetheless, the majority of these schemes emphasize penalizing the vehicles that opt to take the congested roads or charge in the crowded charging station and do not reward the vehicles that cooperate with the traffic management system. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic traffic congestion pricing and electric vehicle charging management system for the internet of vehicles in an urban smart city environment. The proposed system rewards the drivers that opt to take alternative congested-free ways and congested-free charging stations. We propose a token management system that serves as a virtual currency, where the vehicles earn these tokens if they take alternative non-congested ways and charging stations and use the tokens to pay for the charging fees. The proposed system is designed for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) in the context of a smart city environment without the need to set up any expensive toll collection stations. Through large-scale traffic simulation in different smart city scenarios, it is proved that the system can reduce the traffic congestion and the total charging time at the charging stations.