Development of Vehicle Platoon Distribution Models and Simulation of Platoon Movements on Indian Rural Corridors

Abstract

Prepared in cooperation with the Indiana Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration. AbstractSince the 1980s, traffic volumes have experienced a rapid growth of approximately 30% in Indiana. Traffic data indicates that more than 70% of vehicles travel in platoons on Indiana highway corridors in the vicinity of urban areas. At a rural highway intersection consisting of a major road with high traffic volume and a minor road with low traffic volume, it is very common that the green time cannot be used efficiently, especially when the vehicle detectors on the major road are imbedded close to the intersection. In Indiana, most of the traffic signal timing systems operate well. However, these systems do not allow for considering the presence of vehicle platoons on major roads. For a semi-actuated or fully actuated signal control, the green on the major road is often terminated at the intersection due to the arrival of vehicles on the minor road. Vehicle platoons are often stopped to give the right-of-way to the minor traffic, even only a single vehicle. As a result, vehicle platoons are delayed, and the green time is not efficiently used. If this can be improved, traffic delay will be reduced. This study, as the second phase of a two-phase study of vehicle platoons, was conducted to improve traffic control at intersections on Indiana rural corridor. Major parameters of the vehicle platoon characteristics include platoon headway, inter-platoon headway, platoon size and platoon speed. Platoon behaviors and distribution patterns were identified with respect to these parameters. A platoon-based adaptive algorithm was derived for traffic signal timing. A simulation computer program was developed for analyzing the performance of platoon-based traffic control systems and effects of the key platoon related traffic measurements.17.

Bandwidth Synchronization Under Progression Time Uncertainty

“…If there are no sufficient traffic data collected, the platoon speed distribution can be used as a surrogate to generate random progression time. Jiang et al [49] collected speed data using loop detectors and showed that the platoon speed follows the normal distribution well. In addition, it is beneficial to utilize other common distributions (e.g., uniform distribution) and then conduct sensitivity analysis.…”

“…The cycle-by-cycle platoon speed is often considerably lower than the prevailing speed (e.g., see the field data in [49,Sec. 3.5]).…”

A connectivity-aware intersection-based routing in VANETs

“…Moreover, because of the large number of vehicles and the restricted road topology, vehicle speed is generally low, and the mobility dynamics change not as frequently in urban area as the highway. Therefore, the traffic density and packet delay will not change so much in a few of seconds [3]. Accordingly, the real-time traffic density and packet delay information instead of static information can be used as the routing metric to improve the routing performance.…”

“…The reason is that vehicles are frequently interrupted due to the traffic signals and often slow down or stop in front of the intersections. In addition, traffic statistics indicate that more than 70% of the vehicles travelling in a platoon form in urban areas [3], which may further increase the disconnection probability considering the possible gap between clusters. Hence, routing protocols that simply consider the average vehicle density or probability of connectivity may choose the improper road segment I 11 I 12 instead of I 21 I 22 and result in local optimums as shown in Figure 1.…”

Contribution to the platoon distribution analysis in steady-state traffic conditions

“…Such a very high practical interest accounts for the numerous models developed over the years. By way of an example, it is worth mentioning the research conducted by Baras et al [8], which also considers facilities with interrupted flow -and the most recent studies by Ramezani et al [9] and Jiang et al [10]. Still today, therefore, the topic has a remarkable scientific and practical interest and deserves in-depth analysis.…”