Proactive traffic merging strategies for sensor-enabled cars

Abstract

Congestion is a major challenge in today's road traffic. This paper addresses the issue of how to optimize traffic throughput on highways, in particular for intersections where a ramp leads onto the highway. In our work we assume that cars are equipped with sensors: they can detect the distance to the neighboring cars and communicate their velocity and acceleration among each other. We present proactive traffic control algorithms for merging different streams of sensor-enabled cars into a single stream. The main idea of a proactive merging algorithm is to decouple the decision point from the actual merging point. Sensor-enabled cars allow us to decide where and when a car merges before it ar..