Academic research on connected vehicle platooning at urban intersections.
Nationwide, United States
Doubling throughput in urban roads by platooning
Summary Information
This paper explored the use of connected vehicle technology to increase the capacity of urban roads based on the simple idea that if connected vehicle technology can enable vehicles to form platoons, the effective capacity of intersections can be substantially increased.
A queuing model (Point Q) was used to emulate vehicle arrivals, departures, and signal actuation across a small simulated network of 16 intersections and 73 links. The model showed that if vehicles approaching or queued at an intersection were able to communicate with each other as well as the signal controller, their longitudinal motion could be coordinated in such a way that would enable them to move together as a platoon and effectively increase the saturation flow rate of the intersection with no change to its signal control timing.
FINDINGS
The modeling effort demonstrated that that bottleneck capacity can be increased by a factor of two if vehicles can be organized to cross intersections in platoons with 0.75 s headway at 45 mi/h or 0.7 s headway at 30 mi/h to achieve a saturation flow rate of 4800 vph per lane.
