A Concept of Multiple-lane Vehicle Grouping by Swarm Intelligence

Abstract

It is known that nowadays there are too many vehicles present on the roads that lead to an increased risk of accidents, fuel consumption, and pollution, vehicle components wear, more traffic jams, driving stress and discomfort for the passengers, longer journey duration, large vehicle-to-vehicle gaps. One solution is represented by vehicle platooning, which brings many advantages, but is naturally based on single-lane scenarios. Since vehicles drive on multiple-lane roads and highways and considering the optimal space utilization, the following concept is to treat vehicles as multiple-lane groups, i.e., individual vehicles that travel closely together on different lanes and are electronically connected through communications, by using swarm intelligence that borrows ideas from swarm robotics and dynamical multi-objective optimization. As such, this paper makes a survey of the state-of-the-art related to vehicle platooning, swarm robotics concepts, swarm path planning and traffic simulators, and presents their links in the proposed concept.