HIGHWAY-LEVEL VEHICLE CONTROL FOR AHS

Current research on advanced vehicle control systems (AVCS) emphasizes the regulation of individual vehicles from a vehicle-level point of v iew. To improve the roadway operational efficiency, however, it is nec essary to coordinate the operations of the vehicles on the highway. In this paper, a highway-level control algorithm is proposed which optim izes the traffic flow from a system-level viewpoint. The highway is di vided into cells. The density and average speed of vehicles in these c ells are assumed to be measured in real-time. Desired vehicle accelera tion and lane change commands are assumed to be transmitted through co mmunication devices to the vehicles, which optimize the traffic flow o ver the whole highway section. The system-wide traffic is optimized by using the downstream traffic status as the ''preview'' information fo r upstream traffic regulation. Numerical simulations were performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithms.