Project

The beginning of automated driving is upon us. We are slowly implementing adaptive cruise control (ACC) vehicles, however cooperative automated vehicles (CAVs) are not yet operating on the motorways. The communication between the CAVs should help to improve throughput on the motorways by creating platoons. These “platoons” are two or more vehicles driving with small inter-vehicle gaps, which is enabled by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication between the CAVs. The implementation of the CAVs on the motorways still awaits. Which is normal since it takes a while before the carpark of any given country is refreshed. However that does mean that high… Read More »Platooning strategies for cooperative automated vehicles

A lot of time and energy is wasted when vehicles are waiting for an intersection while nobody is moving. To improve this, it is important to have an optimal switching scheme between the red, amber, and green phases. Nowadays there are three main methods to implement a switching scheme. The first one is using fixed-time control, which is implemented based on historical data. The second one uses vehicle-actuated control, which reacts on the presence of vehicles or other road users. The last method is traffic responsive control, which looks at the traffic demand. The difference is that a vehicle-actuated controller… Read More »Intelligent control of intersections

As a self-organizing system, the traffic system is quite complicated. There are many disturbance factors to lead to various traffic problems. One of the daily occurring problems is congestion on the motorway. In order to reduce congestion, Rijkswaterstaat applies various dynamic traffic management measures to guide and steer the traffic and it works well in conventional traffic. However, automated vehicles enter the market and will start to play an essential role in future traffic. The automated vehicles’ reaction to traffic management measures may be different from conventional vehicles while the traffic problems still exist. Therefore, it is necessary to research… Read More »Effectiveness of ramp metering with automated vehicles

Many sections of freeways in the Netherlands have experienced an increase in the legal limit since the implementation of the 130 km/h general limit on freeways in September 2012. However, because of the current crisis regarding the nitrogen-dioxide policy of the national government, speed limits on certain sections around nature parks have been reduced and it has been planned to reduce the speed limits on all freeways between 06:00 and 19:00 to 100 km/h to further combat the emissions of nitrogen-dioxides. There are reasons to suspect that higher speed limits may lead to lower flow due to more disturbances in the stream, caused by more frequent lane changing… Read More »Effect of speed limits on the capacity

During a large-scale infrastructure project, there is two main causes of emission. At first, there are emissions from materials of construction and their transport, maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation of the highway infrastructure. And secondly, due to the traffic congestion caused by the road works, there are emissions from extra kilometers due to diverting traffic. The project deals with the minimisation of CO2-emissions and investigates the impact of road works planning decisions on these emissions.

Congestion on the Dutch highway system has been increasing over the last years. Road sections that contribute to the emergence of congestion, are on-ramp merging areas. This is due to too many vehicles wanting to merge onto the main road. Coordinating this manoeuvre in an organized way, would reduce the consequences of too many vehicles wanting to merge on the main road. Ramp metering attempts to achieve this and it has been found that ramp metering systems indeed decrease the overall time spent in the system. Therefore, ramp metering systems are in place at various sites in the Netherlands. However,… Read More »Microscopic ramp metering

Our world is constantly shifting and the pace of change is only increasing. Perhaps, the most important change is the exponential increase in the global population over the last decades. New cities have been developed, while the already existing ones have experienced an unprecedented growth as people shifted from rural to urban areas. At the same time, the need for transportation of both goods and people has become of paramount importance. To facilitate this ever growing need, a large infrastructure system has been build. The infrastructure network includes many physical components such as roads, tunnels and bridges. Indisputably, freeways are… Read More »Optimising merging behaviour through ITS