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The following two proposals are presented: (1) Vehicles are organized in platoons in which the lead car is manually driven and the other cars are under automatic spacing (headway) control. A plausible model of the resulting flow of traffic indicates that, for an average platoon size of 20, the capacity of the freeway increases by a factor of four. (2) A macroscopic model of freeway traffic congestion along with a control law for reducing congestion is presented. Simulation of the resulting closed loop model indicates a dramatic reduction in congestion.

This research is aimed at the identification of all types of accidents that have occurred on freeways which may affect the vehicle movement in the assumed automated left lane. The emphasis was on six-lane or more urban freeways. The accident data was obtained from the California TASAS ( Traffic Accidents Surveillance and Analysis System) data base and were used to identify all the accidents that originated outside the potential automated area and which affected movement of traffic in the leftmost lane.

This report deals with an introduction to the control aspect of platoon maneuvers in Automated Highway Systems. The different platoon maneuvers include lane changes, merge procedures and split procedures. The first part of the report consists of a review of the existing literature in this area. The survey is split up into the quasi-synchronous and vehicle follower controller methods of approach to the problem. The subsequent sections deal with the mathematical description of the problem with two representations of the system under study, varying only in level of model complexity. The...

The need for a drivers’ model that integrates a wider range of natural driver activities is important to the traffic engineering and human factors communities. Integration of real traffic behaviors into micro-simulations increases the accuracy and explanatory power of these models. For human factors engineers, improvements to driver modeling efforts provide a useful framework by which Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) can be evaluated for safety and mobility. This project includes a means to consider normal lane changing maneuver, driver support for emergency management and impaired...