The merging of main road and on-ramp traffic is known to lead to congestion under heavy traffic conditions. This is mainly due to the underutilization of the road infrastructure and the lack of efficiency in the way the in which the merging manoeuvre is performed by human drivers. We propose a merging algorithm based on our previous work on slot-based driving which employs cooperation between vehicles within the main motorway as well as between motorway and onramp vehicles to achieve a highly efficient merging. The results of the evaluation show that our algorithm achieves a very high throughput and low delay on the on-ramp and clearly outperforms the merging performed by VISSIM's human driver model.

Abstract-To address the goal of providing drivers on highways with guaranteed arrival times, we propose a traffic management system that combines virtual slots with semiautonomous driving to shape traffic and prevent congestion. Two algorithms that address aligning vehicles into slots and efficient merging from three to two lanes are proposed. Furthermore, an implementation and evaluation of these algorithms using the VISSIM traffic simulator is presented. Our initial results indicate that a slot-based system has the potential to be used to guarantee arrival times and provide a significant overall increase in efficiency when compared against a human driving model.

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