Lane assignment on automated highway systems

The automation of highways as part of the intelligent vehicle highway system (IVHS) program is seen as a way to alleviate congestion on urban highways. This paper discusses the concept of lane assignment in the context of automated highway systems (AHS). Lane assignments represent the scheduling of the path taken by the vehicle once it enters an automated multilane corridor. We discuss the classification of lane assignment strategies into nonpartitioned (totally unconstrained, general, and constant lane) and partitioned (destination monotone, origin monotone, and monotone) strategies. Next, an optimization problem is formulated with the performance criterion being a combination of travel time and manoeuvre costs. Conditions under which the optimal strategy is partitioned, or nearly so, are discussed. We present two algorithms to determine suboptimal partitioned strategies given an optimal nonpartitioned one. A case study of a hypothetical automated highway and the strategies obtained for it under the minimization of total travel time criterion is presented.