California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This research seeks to provide an understanding of the capacity and throughput require- ments of an automated highway system(AHS) via development of a computer model that represents system capacity and demand, operational characteristics, and defined infras- tructure. To do that, a variety of scenarios representing traffic input to the system must be represented. Also, a variety of infrastructures representing different system configurations must be represented. This includes the locations of entrances and exits.

Detailed vehicle-based simulations have been used to investigate AHS capacity and throughput requirements in past studies(see [5]). In these studies, flows of 6000-8000 vehicles/lane/hour were achieved using the platoon organization of vehicles. However, disturbances to traffic flow due to lane changes were noted and also not all vehicles were able to reach their respective exits. This computer model addresses the issues of requiring all vehicles to reach their destinations and of achieving high flow rates while not allowing serious purturbations to existing traffic. However, instead of simulation, this model involves an analytic, flow-based optimization approach that involves solving a linear program( LP).