Future Traffic Management in a Lane-Free World

Project Description

While lanes are instrumental in helping the human driver and increase safety and efficiency in present-day traffic, the need for their existence can be questioned for the case of a fully connected and automated environment. In such a case, lanes might not be necessary as an organizational structure for traffic flow. Smart traffic management strategies relying on new automation and communication technologies in a lane-free world could maximize the utilization of existing road capacities. This would also allow for a dynamic allocation of infrastructure in response to demand, for example by adjusting the boundary between opposing traffic streams. As a consequence, this improved exploitation of existing infrastructure could substantially reduce the need for costly extensions of such, enabling a drastic reduction of infrastructure investment costs. Under such a system, existing infrastructure could be utilized to its full potential. In order to realize such a concept, however, completely new traffic control and management strategies need to be developed and applied.

Project Goal

In this project, in order to be able to effectively design and evaluate strategies and policies that exploit the lane-free concept, appropriate modelling frameworks will be developed. The development of new models is necessary due to the fact that existing models for vehicular traffic evolved from their very beginning based on the concept of lanes and thus heavily rely on it, as illustrated by the fact that microscopic modelling techniques generally consist of two separate models: a car-following model for the behaviour within lanes and a model for changing between lanes.

Inspired by the novel lane-free traffic concept, we propose a two-step approach to explore innovative ways to maximize road capacity utilization in urban areas as well as on freeways:

1. We will design microscopic vehicle movement strategies which consider the road as a 2D-continuous space and allow the incorporation of nudging forces and other new urban lane-free concepts such as flocking.
2. We will apply these newly developed models in order to design and evaluate traffic management strategies and transport policies which are motivated by the lane-free concept. The goal of said strategies will be to reduce externalities such as congestion and to enable a more sustainable urban and interurban transport systems.

Tasks of the Chair

The Chair of Traffic Engineering is responsible for the whole project and carries out the research independently. In order to decide on suitable policies for each considered scenario, a workshop with municipality officials will be organized to discuss new opportunities and challenges and to develop guiding principles. In this workshop, the key performance indicators (KPI) for evaluating the impacts of management strategies will also be discussed.