On-ramp traffic merging using cooperative intelligent vehicles: A slot-based approach

The merging of main road and on-ramp traffic is known to lead to congestion under heavy traffic conditions. This is mainly due to the underutilization of the road infrastructure and the lack of efficiency in the way the in which the merging manoeuvre is performed by human drivers. We propose a merging algorithm based on our previous work on slot-based driving which employs cooperation between vehicles within the main motorway as well as between motorway and on-ramp vehicles to achieve a highly efficient merging. The results of the evaluation show that our algorithm achieves a very high throughput and low delay on the on-ramp and clearly outperforms the merging performed by VISSIM´s human driver model.