Platoons of connected vehicles can double throughput in urban roads

By Jennie Lioris, Ramtin Pedarsani, F. Y. Taşcıkaraoğlu, Pravin Pratap Varaiya. 2015

375 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intersections are the bottlenecks of the urban road system because an intersection's capacity is only a fraction of the flows that the roads connecting to the intersection can carry. This capacity can be increased if vehicles can cross the intersections in platoons rather than one by one as they do today. Platoon formation is enabled by connected vehicle technology. This paper assesses the potential mobility benefits of platooning. It argues that saturation flow rates, and hence intersection capacity, can be doubled or tripled by platooning. The argument is supported by the analysis of three queuing models and by the simulation of a road network with 16 intersections and 73 links. The queuing analysis and the simulations reveal that a signalized network with fixed time control will support an increase in demand by a factor of (say) two or three if all saturation flows are increased by the same factor, with no change in the control. Furthermore, despite the increased demand vehicles will experience the same delay and travel time. The same scaling improvement is achieved when the fixed time control is replaced by the max pressure adaptive control. Part of the capacity increase can alternatively be used to reduce queue lengths and the associated queuing delay by decreasing the cycle time. Impediments to the control of connected vehicles to achieve platooning at intersections appear to be small.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c92291ccb04208831058aee7869053fcce7e9bd7

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In Control and Systems Engineering

In Transportation

Citations in the corpus

Urban traffic signal control with connected and automated vehicles: A survey (2019, methodology): “Although the idea of platoon-based traffic signal control has been proposed for several decades (Mirchandani and Head, 2001), it became realistic only after V2X technique was introduced (He et al., 2012; Liang et al., 2018; Lioris et al., 2017; Xie et al., 2012).”
Control of Connected and Automated Vehicles: State of the Art and Future Challenges (2018, background): “A typical instrumented intersection (see e.g. [42]) features in-roadway sensors, like loop detectors or magnetic sensors, that detect the presence of vehicles at a stop bar.”