INTELLIGENT VEHICLES: CLOSING THE LOOP WITH THE HIGHWAY

Vehicle intelligence has been advocated as a potential way of improving safety, driver comfort, traffic flow characteristics and efficiency in general. Despite considerable research efforts in vehicle technologies, vehicles continue to be treated as passive users of the traffic network while highway traffic operates as an open loop dynamical system most of the time. The purpose of this paper is to present and analyse vehicle technologies which could help close the loop with the highway system. Vehicle to road communication would allow vehicles to act as sensors and actuators by having the vehicles communicate to the roadway their speed, location, origin/destination and status and respond to the roadway by obeying speed limits and ramp metering lights. This communication technology together with a traffic management and control system could lead to a new generation of highway system which could be effectively controlled to operate as close to capacity as possible. In this paper we describe the structure of the proposed controlled highway system and present some preliminary results.