Platoon-based Vehicle Coordination Scheme for Resolving Sudden Traffic Jam in the IoV Era

In the next decades, the popularity of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technologies and autonomous driving promises to fundamentally change the way of handling the traffic flow on the streets. Traffic separation can be entirely carried out from a remote traffic control center without the police. This work introduces a sequential coordination algorithm, namely SCA, to form and sort platoons of vehicles to quickly exit traffic bottleneck areas caused by temporary situations, such as vehicular accidents and a slow tractor. By exploiting maneuver information from IoV data sharing, SCA schedules the vehicles in a queue by their arrival and lane priority and then instructs them to safely drive through in order. The experimental results demonstrate our approach can reduce up to 32% waiting time for the vehicles to exit accident spots.