Platooning Graph for Safer Traffic Management

Abstract

Each year, millions of people either die or get injured due to road incidents. Thus, integrating safety optimization techniques into future traffic systems is of utmost importance. Emerging connected vehicle technologies have enabled ways to manage traffic networks with optimization goals such as travel time efficiency, fuel efficiency. However, these existing studies have focused less on maximizing traffic safety. Increasing space between vehicles in the road network with an acceptable travel time increase will help to improve the safety of the system. We propose the Platooning Graph, which is capable of modelling the inter-vehicular spacing optimization problem and we provide a fast and readily deployable algorithm to find a good approximate solution. Using microscopic traffic simulations, we demonstrate how the proposed method can improve safety, with minimal impact on travel time.

Real-time road safety optimization through network-level data management

“…The aforementioned graphs only model traffic conflicts at individual road segments or individual intersections. Different to these conflict graphs, our previous work [11] develops a data structure called platooning graph, which is based on a conflict graph that models traffic conflicts in a continuous space. The conflict graph can model conflict zones that span multiple road segments and multiple intersections, which enables a significantly more effective representation of spatio-temporal data that suits network-level traffic management.…”

“…(1). Our previous study also measures road safety based on DTTC [11]. DTTC is derived from Time Integrated TTC [40] that has been widely adopted by the research community.…”

“…The Safest Platooning Graph (SPG) is also proposed in our previous work [11]. SPG is similar to CZMP as it aims to achieve a balance between road safety and travel time.…”

“…Our research problem is named Network-Level Safety Optimization (NSO). To achieve the balance between the two factors, our preliminary work develops Safest Platooning Graph (SPG), which is a prototype solution to give driving directions for safety improvements [11]. To build SPG, we model traffic conflicts in a graph and then resolve those conflicts on First-Come-First-Serve (FCFS) basis to decide the vehicle passing order at the conflicting locations, including lanes and intersections inside the road network.…”