The objective of this proposal is to design part of an Intelligent Vehicle/Highway (IVHS). Underlying IVHS is the belief that a dramatic increase in highway capacity can be achieved by the automatic control of vehicles in cooperation with an enhanced traffic management capability installed in the highway system. It is proposed to design and test a significant part of the control system dealing with maneuvers of cars in platoons. As far as possible, the existing theory of discrete event systems will be used, making extensions to the theory when it is necessary. The design effort will expose significant questions which the current theory cannot adequately address. The design will be evaluated on a 1,000 vehicle simulation of a section of a highway. It is hoped that the experiment will yield a ballpark estimate of how much highway capacity can be increased by IVHS.
