Maximum Traffic Flow Patterns in Interacting Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

We consider the auto-organization of a set of autonomous vehicles following each other on either an innite or circular road. The behavior of each car is specied by its "speed regulator", a device that decides to increase or decrease the speed of the car as a function of the head-tail distance to its predecessor and the speed of both cars. A collective behavior emerges that corresponds to previously proposed cellular automata trac models. We further analyze the trac patterns of the system in the long term, as governed by the speed regulator and we study under which conditions trac patterns of maximum ow can or cannot be reach. We show the existence of suboptimal ow conditions that require external coordination mechanisms (that we don not consider in this paper) in order to reach the optimal ow achievable with the given density.