Motorway flow optimization in presence of vehicle automation and communication systems

Abstract

This paper describes a novel approach for defining optimal strategies in motorway traffic flow control, considering that a portion of vehicles are equipped with vehicle automation and communication systems. An optimisation problem, formulated as a Quadratic Programming (QP) problem, is developed with the purpose of minimising traffic congestion. The proposed problem is based on a first-order macroscopic traffic flow model able to capture the lane changing and the capacity drop phenomena. An application example demonstrates the achievable improvements in terms of the Total Time Spent if the vehicles travelling on the motorway are influenced by the control actions computed as a solution of the optimisation problem.