Swarming of vehicles in order to enhance the quality of the traffic flow on manoeuvre level

Abstract

Too often traffic jams occur due to a sudden and momentary exceed of the road capacity by the traffic intensity. Moments that will occur more often with an ever growing number of vehicles on the roads. What if we can enhance the group behaviour on the road in order to prevent or postpone such crystallisation? The idea is that vehicle drivers prevent or postpone certain traffic jams by starting to cooperate the moment they 'feel' crystallisation is likely to start. In fact just as in nature ants and birds start to cooperate when the situation asks for it. We have explored the possibilities of swarming behaviour in road traffic. It proves to be rather promising. The concept as developed and the results of the experiments performed last year are published in this paper