Dynamic Road Management in the Era of CAV

Traffic management and on-road safety have been a concern for the transportation authorities and the engineering communities for many years. Most of the implemented technologies for intelligent highways focus on safety measures and increased driver awareness, and expect a centralized management for the vehicular traffic flow. Leveraging recent advances in wireless communication, researchers have proposed solutions based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication in order to detect traffic jams and better disseminate data from on-road and on-vehicle sensors. Moreover, the development of connected autonomous vehicles (CAV) have motivated a paradigm shift in how traffic will be managed. Overall, these major technological advances have motivated the notion of dynamic traffic management (DTM), where smart road reconfiguration capabilities, e.g., dynamic lane reversal, adaptive traffic light timing, etc. will be exploited in real-time to improve traffic flow and adapt to unexpected incidents. This chapter discusses what the challenges in realizing DTM are and covers how CAV has revolutionized traffic management. Moreover, we highlight the issues for handling human-driven vehicles while roads are transitioning to CAV only traffic. Particularly, we articulate a new vision for inter-vehicle communication and assessment of road conditions, and promote a novel system for traffic management. Vehicle to on-road sensors as well as inter-vehicle connectivity will be enabled through the use of handheld devices such as smartphones. This not only enables real-time data sharing but also expedites the adoption of DTM without awaiting the dominant presence of autonomous vehicle on the road. ...