Vehicle Following On A Ring Road Under Safety Constraints: Role of Connectivity and Coordination

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the dynamics of homogeneous vehicles on a ring road under safety constraints, exploring how connectivity and coordination influence vehicle configurations, speeds, and safety in traffic networks.

Contribution

It introduces vehicle controllers that incorporate safety, connectivity, and coordination, revealing their effects on vehicle configurations and maximum traffic capacity.

Findings

Vehicles can form multiple configurations below a critical number.

V2V communication increases the maximum number of vehicles at maximum speed.

Central coordination can steer vehicles to desired configurations while ensuring safety.

Abstract

A fundamental problem in traffic networks is driving under safety and limited physical space constraints. In this paper, we design longitudinal vehicle controllers and study the dynamics of a system of homogeneous vehicles on a single-lane ring road in order to understand the interplay of limited space, speed, and safety. Each vehicle in the system either operates in the cruise control mode or follows a vehicle ahead by keeping a safe time headway. We show that if the number of vehicles is less than a certain critical threshold, vehicles can occupy the limited space in many different configurations, i.e., different platoons of different sizes, and they converge to a uniform maximum speed while attenuating errors in the relative spacing upstream a platoon. If the number of vehicles exceeds the threshold, vehicles converge to a unique symmetric configuration and the equilibrium speed decreases as the number of vehicles increases. Next, we consider vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication and show that it increases the critical number of vehicles that can travel with the maximum speed. Finally, we consider central coordination and show that the proposed controllers can force vehicles to converge to a desired configuration specified by the coordinator while maintaining safety and comfort. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed controllers via simulation.