Adding even a small number of autonomous vehicles to the road could make traffic significantly faster, greener and safer in the near future, a new study finds.
Although driverless cars may result in safer, faster and more efficient roads, it will take a long time before all traffic becomes autonomous. As such, researchers Amir Goldental and Ido Kanter at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, wanted to see what roads might be like given hybrid traffic made up of a mix of human-driven and autonomous vehicles.
One might assume that driverless car manufacturers would focus solely on optimizing the performance of their own autonomous vehicles (AVs). This would mean traffic flow would only significantly improve when human-driven vehicles were negligible in number.
However, the scientists found even a small number of AVs could significantly boost traffic flow if they could organize themselves into constellations. These constellations can shepherd human-driven vehicles in ways that reduce excessive braking and acceleration. The research team’s computer models suggested it was possible to achieve “up to a 40 percent enhancement in traffic flow efficiency and up to a 28 percent reduction in fuel consumption even when only 5 percent of vehicles are autonomous,” Goldental said.
The scientists developed guidelines to help AVs cooperate on freeways. Doing so could split traffic into controllable clusters that could transform even congested roads into faster, more efficient flows in less than two minutes, they said. This could also enhance traffic safety by making traffic more orderly and reducing lane transitions. All this can occur without a central agent governing the AVs and without communication between the AVs.”It takes only a small number of AVs to make a big change on a multi-lane freeway,” Goldental said.
