Traffic bottlenecks have a significant influence on the capacity of the affected route, often aggravated in dynamic, transient situations due to human driver's tendency to increase the subjective safety margin in transient situations. In this paper, an autonomous convoy controller with a headway of 0.8 s is presented. While this headway and the resulting distances are still above the margins which are technically possible, this concept has the advantages of higher safety, reliability and driver's comfort. Moreover, it is shown in this paper that already with this headway in the convoy a remarkable gain in capacity may be achieved at bottlenecks. For this, a dynamic control concept is proposed for forming a convoy while approaching the bottleneck, driving it through the bottleneck and decomposing it afterwards. All these manoeuvres are done smoothly with regard to driver's comfort. The benefit of convoy driving is demonstrated for two standard situations: a signalised intersection and a lane drop on a motorway. It is shown that in both situations the capacity can be increased significantly and how this depends on the percentage of equipped cars.
Samenvatting