Lane assignment on automated highway systems

The automation of highways as part of the IVHS program is seen as a way to alleviate congestion on urban highways. This thesis discusses the concept of lane assignment in the context of automated highway systems (AHS). Lane assignments represent the scheduling of the path taken by vehicles once they enter an automated multi-lane corridor. In this thesis, we formulate the static lane assignment problem as an optimization problem. We establish a classification of lane assignment strategies, beginning from totally unconstrained strategies and ending with partitioned strategies.Lane assignment is performed and analyzed under two distinct performance measures. First, we consider the minimization of total travel time of all the vehicles on the AHS. We present algorithms that find a partitioned strategy in the neighborhood of a nonpartitioned strategy. Second, we study the balanced use of the lanes of the AHS. This problem reduces to a worst case maxmin problem. We present algorithms for obtaining the optimal or suboptimal strategy. We present and analyze the results of a case study of a hypothetical automated highway under the two performance measures stated above. The results show that at high levels of congestion, the optimal lane assignment strategies are close to being partitioned and that the developed algorithms perform efficiently in calculating the optimal or suboptimal strategies.The static lane assignment problem was studied to grasp the essential features of lane scheduling under simplifying assumptions that decouple the system-wide traffic flow problem from the dynamic effects of the motion of individual vehicles. To study the effect of various control, communication and scheduling schemes on the dynamic capacity of the highway, a C++ class library and a Tcl front end have been developed. These can be used to create an AHS simulator that may be used to study the speed, concentration and flow characteristics of traffic flow on an AHS. A number of test simulation runs have been performed using the front end and the AHS classes in order to perform a face validation of the algorithms that have been coded in.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio