Evaluating advantage of sharing information among vehicles toward avoiding phantom traffic jam

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce an intelligent vehicle in traffic flow where a phantom traffic jam occurs for ensuring traffic-flow stability. The intelligent vehicle shares information on the speed and gap of the leading vehicle. Furthermore, the intelligent vehicle can foresee changes in the leading vehicles through shared information and can start accelerating faster than human-driven vehicles can. We propose an intelligent-vehicle model, which is a generalized Nagel--Schreckenberg model that allows sharing information with leading vehicles. The generalized Nagel--Schreckenberg model can arbitrarily set the number of leading vehicles to share information with, and we found that phantom traffic jams are resolved by an intelligent vehicle that shares information with two or more vehicles in front.