Speed Control of Inflow Vehicles for Merging Support on Motorways with Limited I2V Communication

Abstract

Since merging is one of the most difficult situations for automated driving, merging support provided by infrastructure is extremely helpful for automated vehicles on motorways. However, in the early stages of automated vehicle penetration, infrastructure-side equipment to support merging is limited. In the first half of this chapter, a method to support speed control for inflow vehicles is proposed for the case where there is one detection device on the main lanes and one transmission/detection device for the vehicles in the inflow lane. In the second half, the case equipped with an additional detector and transmitter downstream on each lane is dealt with. New accurate information about the merging vehicles concerned could be given to the speed controller in the infrastructure. The control should be recalculated and sent to the inflow vehicle that has already started. Each control problem is formulated in the optimal control theory and calculated numerically by a nonlinear programming algorithm. The computational experiment is performed in each realistic situation.