Simulation of intelligent merging control for Personal Rapid Transit

In this research, a smart transportation system integrated with a management system of highly distributed communication network for Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) was designed. The Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system is a new and easy-to-use transportation solution for 1–4 persons to destination directly. PRT system offers great potential for becoming a common transportation system in the future involving driverless vehicles, ride comfort and collision warning with low construction cost and operation cost. In PRT system, two important functions are automatic driverless control and crossway merging control. To have safe and smooth merging operation in automated vehicle systems for PRT, a merging management system is necessary. Our work proposed a new merging management system related to distributed traffic control, new locating method and safe dynamic headway. In this system, an efficient car communication was built based on the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless protocol and highly distributed control. In order to determine the car location, RFID technique is used in the system. A new buffer-zone strategy and fuzzy logic control are two efficient vehicle-merging algorithms that are required for dynamic determination of the merging sequence for all cars in a Y-intersection. From simulation results, it was found that cruise distance can be safely kept from each car to its front car and each car can merge into mainline smoothly gently and efficiently.