A cooperative control system for virtual train crossing

Abstract

The use of individual vehicles is increasing in inner cities involving a large number of unwanted side effects. However, the rise of intelligent vehicle technologies allows finding a solution to some of these problem bringing new vehicle usage. For traffic jam management, aside to widespread traffic light control, one of the promising solutions is the possibility to form virtual trains with vehicles so as to increase road capacities. This solution, however relevant it is, suffer from limitations when the road network has many interconnections where interactions between trains are hard to define. This requires thus a control process which can deal with train, vehicles, and hardware control issues. The goal of this paper is to propose a multi-level cooperative control system. This proposal relies on a dynamic adaptation of train parameters in runtime and allows crossroads and roundabout sharing without stopping any vehicle. The proposal is tested in simulation coping with the roundabout scenario.