Traffic jam is a recurrent problem in large urban centers
that leads to huge economic losses, it has a negative impact on
global productivity and degrades the environment due to greenhouse
gas emissions [1]. For instance, according to the United
States Environmental Protection Agency, the transportation
system was responsible for about 28% of the greenhouse
gas emissions in 2012 [2]. There are a few alternatives to
overcome this endemic problem, such as, invest in the road
infrastructure, encourage people to use public transportation or
rely on information, communication and sensor technologies
to improve traffic efficiency.
Toward such direction are the Intelligent Transportation
Systems (ITSs). In ITSs, pavement sensors are deployed along
the road infrastructure in order to monitor traffic conditions and
vehicles are equipped with computing, storage and wireless
communication interfaces [3]. Therefore, vehicles can interact
and cooperate among themselves, thus creating a vehicular ad
hoc network (VANET) [4]. A few ITSs have been proposed in
the literature in order to detect, control and reduce traffic jams
in large cities [1], [5], [6], [7]. In those systems, information
like vehicle density, vehicle speed or trip time are used
to determine whether there is a traffic congestion or not.
Moreover, re-routing strategies are used in order to minimize
or even avoid the effects related to traffic jams.