Lane assignment of connected vehicles via a hierarchical system

Coordinated lane-assignment strategies present promising approaches for regulating traffic congestion. By anticipating and re-positioning vehicles in response to potential downstream congestion, such systems can greatly improve the safety and efficiency of existing networks, even when only a small portion of vehicles are controlled. Designing systems that can achieve such regulation under practical real-world considerations, however, continues to be a difficult problem. As a step towards solving this problem, this article presents a hierarchical control paradigm suited for macroscopic-level control of the lane change decision-making of individual vehicles. In particular, decision-making is performed at lower-level sections while coordination among sections conducted across higherlevel localities. We then present a control paradigm for the lower level of the hierarchy, defining section-level control via a heuristic model that emphasizes safety and efficiency. Numerical results of the proposed controller in congested freeway settings suggests it can provide notable improvements to mobility in comparison to existing strategies.