Proactive Traffic Merging Strategies for Sensor-Enabled Cars

Abstract

Congestion is a major challenge in today’s road traffic. The primary cause is bottlenecks such as ramps leading onto highways, or lane blockage due to obstacles. In these situations, the road capacity reduces because several traffic streams merge to fewer streams. Another important factor is the non-coordinated driving behavior resulting from the lack of information or the intention to minimize the travel time of a single car. This chapter surveys traffic control strategies for optimizing traffic flow on highways, with a focus on more adaptive and flexible strategies facilitated by current advancements in sensor-enabled cars and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). The authors investigate proactive merging strategies assuming that sensor-enabled cars can detect the distance to neighboring cars and communicate their velocity and acceleration among each other. Proactive merging strategies can significantly improve traffic flow by increasing it up to 100% and reduce the overall travel delay by 30%.