An intelligent highway traffic model using cooperative vehicle platooning techniques

Since the contemporary historical periods onwards policy makers and research bodies are focusing on building highways connecting urban cities. Modern highways play a vital role in increasing the agglomeration benefits of commuters by reducing the travel time, emission levels, fuel consumption, travel fatigue, etc. With the recent progresses on intelligent transport systems (ITS) and vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET), new revolutionizing highway transportation solution proposals are getting released at rapid pace. Vehicular platooning is an emerging research area which tackles common traffic problems via cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) techniques by keeping minimal inter vehicular distances using autonomous methods. In this paper, we select the Southern Expressway (E01 Expressway) located in Sri Lanka as our study region and propose a cooperative vehicle platooning solution which performs better on selected comparison parameters than the non-cooperative methods. Since experimenting our solution directly on real traffic environments will introduce significant disturbances in usual traffic flow, we have followed the simulation procedure for evaluations. For our study, we have used PLEXE an open source simulation framework which extends VEINS vehicular network simulator and SUMO microscopic traffic simulator features. We have evaluated our solution using synthetic traffic data forming a platoon cluster of vehicles.