An active approach to guaranteed arrival times based on traffic shaping

To address the goal of providing drivers on highways with guaranteed arrival times, we propose a traffic management system that combines virtual slots with semi-autonomous driving to shape traffic and prevent congestion. Two algorithms that address aligning vehicles into slots and efficient merging from three to two lanes are proposed. Furthermore, an implementation and evaluation of these algorithms using the VISSIM traffic simulator is presented. Our initial results indicate that a slot-based system has the potential to be used to guarantee arrival times and provide a significant overall increase in efficiency when compared against a human driving model.