Efficient Traffic Coordination for Resolving Temporary Bottlenecks on the Multi-lane Freeways

Resolving traffic bottlenecks caused by emergency situations on the freeways has been a challenge. It often takes much time for the vehicles voluntarily to line up and exit the congestion spot quickly. Unlike existing traffic scheduling schemes, which often rely on traffic signal controllers or are specified for known bottleneck areas, this paper introduces an efficient decentralized traffic coordination method, namely ETRACO, for resolving temporary bottlenecks on the multi-lane freeways. Initially, based on the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) warning notifications about the congestion, the vehicles negotiate with neighbors to determine a suitable configuration (platoon leader, distance gap, velocity, platoon size) for forming platoons. After that, each platoon leader commands the platoon members to change lane under the condition that there is a safe space on the lane next to the current lane so that the platoon can move safely to that lane. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can reduce up to 22% delay for the last few vehicles driving through the congestion area during the congestion period. Furthermore, the proposed approach also effectively reduce congestion time for new incoming vehicles, and maintain the fairness for vehicles to leave the congestion area.