Distributed platoon assignment and lane selection for traffic flow optimization

This paper presents an approach to lane assignment for highway vehicles that increases traffic throughput while ensuring vehicles can exit successfully at their destinations. To enhance traffic safety and increase lane capacities, vehicles can be organized into platoons with the objective of maximizing the travel distance that platoons stay intact and then apply lane assignment to these platoons. The goal of this research is to form a distributed control strategy to select lanes for platoons using inter-vehicle communication. We evaluate the current platoon lane assignment strategy and compare its improvement over average vehicle travel time with the lane assignment for single vehicles reported in our previous work. Simulation results show that while cooperate control for single vehicle lane assignment does lead to decreased vehicle travel times, the implementation of cooperative lane assignment for platooning vehicles leads to an even greater reduction.