Performance study of the lane change control using vehicle communications for alleviating congestion

Congestion on expressways due to traffic concentration at sags has been a serious problem over these decades. One of the reasons to make congestion worse is known to be unbalanced lane utilization and lane change behaviors during the initial stage of congestion. This paper evaluates a dynamic lane change control scheme through road to vehicle communication we have presented to balance lane utilization and avoid lane change behavior that could worse congestion. The results of traffic flow simulation show that the time when the control scheme needs to be started before slowdown of cars due to congestion becomes severe, which is achieved by configurating the velocity threshold to detect congestion to be higher value. Also, it is shown that cars performing the control do not experience unfair performance compared to other cars which did not perform the control under the conditions that only a part of cars have road to vehicle communication capability and they participate into the control.