Two Proposals to Improve Freeway Traffic Flow

The first proposal organizes vehicles in platoons with manually driven lead car and the rest under automatic spacing control. A plausible model of the resulting traffic flow indicates that for an average platoon size of 20, the freeway capacity increases by a factor of four. The second proposal begins with a macroscopic model of freeway congestion and then presents a control law for reducing congestion. Simulation of the resulting closed loop model indicates dramatic reduction in congestion.