DISSIPATION OF TRAFFIC JAMS USING A SINGLE AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE ON A RING ROAD

In this article, we study the problem of stabilizing the traffic flow on a ring road to a uniform steady-state using autonomous vehicles (AV). Traffic is represented at a microscopic level via a Bando-Follow-the-Leader model capable of reproducing phantom jams. For the single-lane case, a single AV can stabilize an arbitrary large ring road with an arbitrary large number of cars. Moreover, this stabilization is exponentially quick with a decay rate independent of the number of cars and a control gain also independent of the number of cars. On the other side, the stabilization domain and stabilization time depend on the number of cars. Two types of controller algorithms are proposed: a proportional control and a proportional-integral control. In both cases, the measurements used by the controller only depend on the local data around the AV, enabling an easy implementation. After numerical tests of the single-lane case, a multilane model is described using a safety-incentive mechanism for lane change. Numerical simulations for the multilane ring road suggest that the control strategy is also very efficient in such a setting, even with a single AV.

Automated summary

In this article, the problem of stabilizing traffic flow on a ring road using autonomous vehicles (AV) is studied. A Bando-Follow-the-Leader model is used to represent traffic at a microscopic level, capable of reproducing phantom jams. It is found that a single AV can stabilize a large ring road with a large number of cars, with an exponentially quick stabilization rate. The control strategy proposed has two types of algorithms and only relies on local data, making it easy to implement.