Towards Co-operative Congestion Mitigation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a shared control framework to evaluate piecewise constant driving policies for congestion mitigation through human-in-the-loop simulations using CARLA and Flow.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to test congestion mitigation policies involving real human drivers in a simulated environment.

Findings

Framework development in progress

Plan for human-in-the-loop user studies

Potential to improve congestion mitigation strategies

Abstract

The effects of traffic congestion are widespread and are an impedance to everyday life. Piecewise constant driving policies have shown promise in helping mitigate traffic congestion in simulation environments. However, no works currently test these policies in situations involving real human users. Thus, we propose to evaluate these policies through the use of a shared control framework in a collaborative experiment with the human driver and the driving policy aiming to co-operatively mitigate congestion. We intend to use the CARLA simulator alongside the Flow framework to conduct user studies to evaluate the affect of piecewise constant driving policies. As such, we present our in-progress work in building our framework and discuss our proposed plan on evaluating this framework through a human-in-the-loop simulation user study.