Analysis of Traffic Performance of a Merging Assistant Strategy Using Cooperative Vehicles

Abstract

Abstract-Emerging in-car communication technologies continually offer new communication capabilities between vehicles and infrastructure that, together with more accurate positioning systems, can be used to improve the use of current infrastructure. The aim of this paper is to present a novel merging assistant strategy that exploits cooperative systems to reduce congestion at motorway junctions. This new system, called Cooperative Merging Assistant, groups main carriageway vehicles together and collects the inter-vehicle spaces into gaps that are usable by merging traffic. These gaps will facilitate the coordinated entry of platoons of vehicles released by an on-ramp traffic signal. The performance of this new system is evaluated using microscopic simulation. Results show the reduction of late-merging vehicles, decrease in congestion and increase of merging capacity. This study shows how the use of cooperative systems can improve the the merging maneuver and so lead to a reduction of congestion on motorways.

Definition of a merging assistant strategy using intelligent vehicles

“…Section 5 reports the main results showing that the deceleration of the cooperative vehicles using the aforementioned approach does not create shock waves. A complete discussion on these aspects can be found in Scarinci et al (2015). Another consideration should be made on the maximum value of ∆v.…”

“…Therefore, here, only a brief description of the main findings is given. A complete evaluation of the traffic performance of the Cooperative Merging Assistant system is done in Scarinci et al (2013), Scarinci (2014) and Scarinci et al (2015).…”

“…This paper focuses on the algorithm definition. However, we report a brief summary of the traffic performance based on previous work for completeness (Scarinci et al, 2015).…”

“…(a) speed-density and (b) flow-density diagrams with the representation of the different traffic state created by the cooperative vehicle. Adapted from(Scarinci et al, 2015).…”

Emission Effects of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control: A Simulation Case Using SUMO

“…Their results show that, in their scenario it is possible to obtain 49% of reduction in travel time delay average and 89% of reduction in delay when it is compared to a scenario with all way stop sign controlled intersection. In [9], a Cooperative Merging Assistant (CooPMA) is introduced. With the V2V and V2I communication, they tried to distribute the spacing between vehicles via using a cooperatively controlled vehicle.…”