A Longitudinal Control Concept For Merging Of Automated Vehicles

This paper is a feasibility study of an automatic traffic merging concept for potential application to Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS). The authors consider a freeway entrance where on-ramp vehicles are to merge into the highway traffic by actively tracking their designated gaps. A longitudinal control system based on homing guidance is proposed and analyzed. The effectiveness of the guidance and control algorithms has been tested through computer simulations. One important feature of this method is that the controller of an on- ramp vehicle utilizes mostly the relative positional information between the vehicle and its target tap. As such infrastructure support could be minimized.