Discrete event modeling and simulation for flow control in an intelligent vehicle highway system (IVHS)

Abstract

This thesis considers lane routing problems in an Intelligent Vehicle Highway System (IVHS). Lane routing is important because the problem of managing the traffic flow on a multilane IVHS will play a major role in an urban environment. In a control system``s point of view, the system architecture for the automated highway is hierarchically decomposed into a network layer, a link layer, a coordination layer, and a regulation layer, from the top to the bottom. The link layer is responsible for the lane routing control. On the other hand, because analytical approaches are impossible for various, almost unpredictable traffic situations, traffic simulations are indispensible for the design and the evaluation of various control strategies of IVHS. The discrete event modeling technique can be employed to describe both macroscopic and microscopic models according to the abstraction level. In particular, when temporal issues of systems are significant, discrete event modeling and simulation can be considered the best solution. Therefore, in order to design a link layer controller, we need a traffic modeling and simulation framework, and the DEVS formalism can be employed for effective traffic modeling and simulation of the IVHS. In this thesis, we propose a lane routing algorithm for vehicles entering the highway to exit successfully at their destination while balancing the lane capacity usage of the highway, even in the face of lane-blocking incident. After that, we present a methodology for the performance evaluation of resulting link layer controller using discrete event modeling and simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed lane routing algorithm gives good performance for traffic flow control in the IVHS.