Safety of a multi-vehicle system in mixed communication environments

Recent news events and statistics demonstrate the frequent occurrence of pile-up crashes on highways. A predominant reason for the occurrence of such crashes is that current vehicles (including those equipped with an Automatic Cruise Control system) do not provide the driver with advance information of events occurring far ahead of him/her. The use of inter-vehicular communication to provide advance warnings to enhance automotive safety is therefore being actively discussed in the research community. In this thesis, we investigate scenarios wherein only a subset of the vehicles in a multi-vehicle stream, are equipped with such advance warning capabilities. These vehicles (equipped with the capability to receive far-ahead information) are arbitrarily distributed among other unequipped vehicles that are capable of receiving only local, near-neighbor information. It is seen that there are conditions wherein even a partial equipment of the system can be beneficial (to both the equipped and the unequipped vehicles in a mixed vehicle stream). We demonstrate this through both simulations and a theoretical analysis. Towards this end, two distinct modeling approaches are adopted: microscopic and macroscopic.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Chakravarthy, Animesh

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Eric Feron.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38642

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38642