With maturation of ubiquitous computing technology, it has become feasible to design new systems to improve our urban life. In this paper, we introduce a new application for car navigation in a city. Every car navigation system in operation today has the current position of the vehicle, the destination, and the currently chosen route to the destination. If vehicles in a city could share this information, they could use traffic information to globally plan semi-optimal routes for each vehicle. Thus, we propose a cooperative car navigation system with route information sharing (RIS). In the RIS system, each vehicle transmits route information (current position, destination, and route to the destination) to a route information server, which estimates future traffic congestion using this information and feeds its estimate back to each vehicle. Each vehicle uses the estimation to re-plan their route. This cycle is then repeated. Our multiagent simulation confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed RIS system. The average travel time of drivers using the RIS system is substantially shorter than the time of drivers who chose shortest distance or simple shortest time estimates. Moreover, as the number of RIS users increases, the total amount of traffic congestion in the city decreases.
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