Traffic control and intelligent vehicle highway systems: a survey

Traffic congestion in highway networks is one of the main issues to be addressed by today's traffic management schemes. Automation combined with the increasing market penetration of on-line communication, navigation and advanced driver assistance systems will ultimately result in intelligent vehicle highway systems (IVHS) that distribute intelligence between roadside infrastructure and vehicles and that - in particular on the longer term - are one of the most promising solutions to the traffic congestion problem. In this study, the authors present a survey on traffic management and control frameworks for IVHS. First, they give a short overview of the main currently used traffic control methods for freeways. Next, they discuss IVHS-based traffic control measures. Then, various traffic management architectures for IVHS such as PATH, Dolphin, Auto21 CDS etc. are discussed and a comparison of the various frameworks is presented. Finally, the authors sketch how existing traffic control methodologies could fit in an IVHS-based traffic control set-up. © 2011 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.