The Traffic Management of Highways by Constant Time to Collision Cruise Control

Abstract

The paper presents a new method of management and optimization for the highway traffic, based on the Constant Time to Collision Criterion. Each car is provided with a constant time to collision cruise controller, which is maintaining optimized distance gaps between cars, with respect to the speed and to the technical data of the cars. These cruise controllers are planned fuzzy-interpolative PD controllers designed with the help of functional computer models of the cars, following a specific scenario that is containing several complete braking actions performed for different constant times to collision. The highway administration has the possibility to control the traffic flow intensity by imposing the same TTC to all the cars: great TTCs for low traffic, small TTCs for high traffic. The CTTC controlled traffic is distributing evenly the collision risk over all the cars.