MERGING PROCESS ANALYSIS FOR AN AUTOMATED HIGHWAY SYSTEM

The proposed Automated Highway System (AHS) is advancing closer and closer to reality every day. Authorized by the 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), the AHS intends to improve the safety and increase the efficiency of our roadways. The AHS intends to raise our quality of life through the transportation infrastructure by reducing time spent in congestion and decreasing the number and severity of traffic accidents. However, these and other benefits can not be realized without effective merging control processes. If these processes are not properly designed and managed, bottlenecking could occur at merging areas and the resulting congestion could spill back onto the mainline AHS. In order to avoid these problems, the merging vehicles must be able to coordinate their speeds and paths with mainline traffic through direct communications and/or infrastructure systems to facilitate a smooth maneuver into appropriately sized gaps. This paper's focus is on the merging control process for AHS to AHS, arterial to AHS, and conventional freeway to AHS interfaces. First, it identifies the requirements for successful merging; including the requirements for the infrastructure, the main stream traffic, and the merging traffic. Next, it develops an approach to an integrated merging process control model including model assumptions, parameters, components, and constraints. Finally, this paper demonstrates how this model can be implemented by a merging control processes controller in AHS development.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • Full conference proceedings available only on CD.
• Corporate Authors:

  ITS America

  1100 17th Street, NW, 12th Floor
  Washington, DC  United States  20036
• Authors:
  • Ran, Bin
  • Leight, S
  • Hu, R R
  • Johnson, S
• Conference:
  • Intelligent Transportation: Realizing the Future. Abstracts of the Third World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems
  • Location: Orlando, Florida
  • Date: 1996-10-14 to 1996-10-18
• Publication Date: 1996

Language

• English

Media Info

• Pagination: n.p.

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Arterial highways; Automated highway systems; Infrastructure; Merging area; Merging control; Merging traffic; Traffic congestion; Traffic crashes
• Old TRIS Terms: Main highways; Merging control processes
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; I73: Traffic Control; I82: Accidents and Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00738761
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jul 26 1997 12:00AM