Coordinated Control Algorithm at Non-Recurrent Freeway Bottlenecks for Intelligent and Connected Vehicles

Abstract

Intelligent and Connected Vehicle (ICV) technology is considered to be a solution to improve the traffic performance. Through the information exchange in real-time among the vehicles, the roadside infrastructures, and the cloud platform, the sensing of the vehicles can be enhanced. This also enables coordinated driving decisions, which can improve traffic operations, especially at bottleneck locations. This paper addresses the problem of coordinating the vehicles near the bottleneck locations to help the vehicles passing the area quickly and smoothly. A lane advisory algorithm is designed to reduce conflicts by encouraging early lane changes. A coordinated vehicle movement planning algorithm is proposed to achieve a smooth longitudinal reference speed profiles for vehicles in the subject area. The algorithm can open enough headway for vehicles to change the lane and continue their trips. The effectiveness of the algorithm is evaluated using SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) as the simulation tool with no communication between vehicles as the benchmark case as well as the case where the vehicular traffic follows the so-called First-in-First-Out (FIFO) principle. The results of the evaluation summarize and indicate that the Coordinated Control Algorithm (CCA) proposed in this paper can improve traffic performance in terms of the average speed, the waiting time, the total travel time, and the traffic flow rate under different levels of service.