The managed motorway: real-time vehicle scheduling

Abstract

Air pollution, traffic congestion, stress and accidents are common features of today's road transportation experience. New approaches to improving the efficiency and safety of transportation systems are therefore required. Existing work on safe high-speed motorway driving, however, either assumes that vehicles are driverless and/or is limited to local decision making or to one-lane-only reservation systems. This paper describes a novel approach to vehicle scheduling based on real-time hierarchical scheduling, local real-time coordination and real-time inter-vehicle communication. We describe a new model in which road users reserve variable-size slots on motorway lanes, which enables enforcement of timeliness guarantees and adaptive scheduling based on a combination of local and global decisions. We present the research challenges that must be tackled to ensure that this vision of managed motorways becomes a reality.