Distributed and Centralized Approaches for Cooperative Road Traffic Dynamics

With the advent of new sensing and communication capabilities, vehicles are now seen as moving sensors which stimulate a renewal of traffic management strategies for both network surveillance and control. Indeed, large deployments of intelligent transport systems and more specifically cooperative systems would provide a dynamic and local-based information network, as equipped vehicles are able to disseminate, receive and forward information with the infrastructure and others vehicles thanks to the C2X framework. This appears to be a promising step forward towards more efficient, safe and environmentally oriented traffic management strategies. Methodological challenges arise when dealing with these new communication features. This paper reports on the research effort dealing with the integration of these new capabilities into traffic models to design cooperative traffic management strategies and demonstrate their benefit on a simple road section. For that, a distributed approach is considered where vehicles can communicate with each other in a given radio interaction range. A linear stability analysis is performed for a given class of car following models. This shows that a distributed cooperative framework can improve traffic flow stability, which is a key to determine whether traffic is likely to enter in congestion or not. The interest of a distributed approach is highlighted and discussed by comparison with a centralized one, which brings up others ways of controlling the traffic flow.