California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This paper presents a theory for automated traffic flow, based on abstraction of vehicle activities such as entry, exit and cruising, derived from a vehicle's automatic control laws. The theory formulates TMC traffic plans as the specification of the activities and speed of vehicles, and the entry and exit flows for each highway section. The theory permits the study of transient phenomena such as congestion, and TMC feed back traffic rules designed to deal with transients.