Traffic waves are phenomena that emerge when the vehicular density exceeds a critical threshold. Considering the presence of increasingly automated vehicles in the traffic stream, a number of research activities have focused on the influence of automated vehicles on the bulk traffic flow. In the present article, we demonstrate experimentally that intelligent control of an autonomous vehicle is able to dampen stop-and-go waves that can arise even in the absence of geometric or lane changing triggers. Precisely, our experiments on a circular track with more than 20 vehicles show that traffic waves emerge consistently, and that they can be dampened by controlling the velocity of a single vehicle in the flow. We compare metrics for velocity, braking events, and fuel economy across experiments. These experimental findings suggest a paradigm shift in traffic management: flow control will be possible via a few mobile actuators (less than 5%) long before a majority of vehicles have autonomous capabilities.
We consider a strongly coupled PDE-ODE system that describes the influence of a slow and large vehicle on road traffic. The model consists of a scalar conservation law accounting for the main traffic evolution, while the trajectory of the slower vehicle is given by an ODE depending on the downstream traffic density. The moving constraint is expressed by an inequality on the flux, which models the bottleneck created in the road by the presence of the slower vehicle. We prove the existence of solutions to the Cauchy problem for initial data of bounded variation.
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