Title: A flexible control study of variable speed limit in connected vehicle systems

Authors: Lu Pu; Xiaowei Xu; Han He; Hanqing Zhou; Zhijun Qiu; Yu Hu

Addresses: School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China ' School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China ' School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China ' School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China ' Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada ' School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

Abstract: Traffic congestion has already been a distinctly serious problem in both developed and developing countries. Among the proposed methods to solve the traffic congestion problem, variable speed limit (VSL) is considered as one of the most promising methods. But to the traditional VSL, the speed limit sign and the control distance is fixed, which makes VSL lack deployment and control flexibility. Whereas, in connected vehicle (CV), which is a crossing field of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and internet of things (IoT), control and deployment flexibility can both be achieved. Furthermore, a big data environment is formed in CV to solve the traffic problems. In this paper, connect vehicle-based variable speed limit (CV-VSL) is proposed, and a simulation platform SimIVC is used to study the influence of control distance. The results show that the improvement of traffic performance increases 0.72% when the control distance is 270 metres than that of 250 metres, which means that the traffic performance can be further improved by CV-VSL.

Keywords: connected vehicles; variable speed limit; VSL, VISSIM; OMNeT++; flexible control; vehicle control; traffic congestion; deployment flexibility; big data; simulation; control distance; vehicle distances.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2015.069997

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2015 Vol.7 No.2, pp.180 - 188

Received: 16 Apr 2014
Accepted: 26 May 2014
Published online: 22 Jun 2015 *

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