Control Concepts for Facilitating Motorway On-ramp Merging Using Intelligent Vehicles

Abstract

Congestion at motorway junctions is a traffic phenomenon that degrades operation of infrastructure and can lead to breakdown of traffic flow and associated reduction in capacity.Advanced communication technologies open new possibilities to prevent or at least delay this phenomenon, and innovative active traffic management systems have been developed in the recent years for better control of motorway traffic. This paper presents a review of control strategies for facilitating motorway on-ramp merging using intelligent vehicles. First, the concepts of the control algorithms are reviewed chronologically divided into three types of intelligent vehicle: completely automated, equipped with cooperative adaptive cruise control and equipped with on-board display. Then, a common structure is identified, and the algorithms are presented based on their characteristics in order to identify similarities, dissimilarities, trends and possible future research directions. Finally, using a similar approach, a review of the methods used to evaluate these control strategies identifies important aspects that should be considered by further research on this topic.

Policy and society related implications of automated driving: A review of literature and directions for future research

“…Accordingly, review efforts have focused on the development and operation of vehicle automation systems and the associated technologies (see Gerónimo, López, Sappa, & Graf, 2010;González, Pérez, Milanés, & Nashashibi, 2016;Piao & McDonald, 2008;Shladover, 2005;Shladover, 1995;Sun, Bebis, & Miller, 2006;Turner & Austin, 2000;Vahidi & Eskandarian, 2003;Xiao & Gao, 2010). Several review studies have also focused on the first-order impacts of vehicle automation with a special emphasis on traffic flow efficiency (see Diakaki, Papageorgiou, Papamichail, & Nikolos, 2015;Hounsell, Shrestha, Piao, & McDonald, 2009;Scarinci & Heydecker, 2014) and human factor aspects such as behavioral adaptation, driver's workload, and situation awareness (see Brookhuis, de Waard, & Janssen, 2001;de Winter, Happee, Martens, & Stanton, 2014;Stanton & Young, 1998). A partial overview of the wider implications of automated vehicles has been recently made by Fagnant and Kockelman (2015) with the aim to provide an order-of-magnitude estimation about the possible economic impacts of automated vehicles in the US context.…”

The State-of-the-Art of Coordinated Ramp Control with Mixed Traffic Conditions

“…In this section, we mainly review the literature that were focused on the low-level system of the coordinated ramp control, which is the coordination of CAVs in terms of their motion control algorithms. Some previous work were reviewed by Rios-Torres et al and Scarinci et al [66], [67]. However, in this section, we strategically categorize all related literature into two types: centralized approaches and distributed approaches.…”

Decentralized Optimal Merging Control for Connected and Automated Vehicles

“…A number of centralized or decentralized merging control mechansims have been proposed [9], [2], [7], [8], [15], [12], [10], [13]. In the case of decentralized control, all computation is performed on board each vehicle and shared only with a small number of other vehicles which are affected by it.…”