A Survey of Traffic Control With Vehicular Communications

TLDR

Traffic control systems have evolved over six decades to meet growing demand, with recent work exploring vehicle‑to‑vehicle communications to boost efficiency. This survey reviews emerging vehicular‑communication‑based traffic control research, emphasizing the shift from feedback to feedforward design and contrasting control preferences. The authors categorize control strategies into three contrasting pairs: predictive control models versus simulations, global planning versus local self‑organization, and rich redundant data versus concise essential data. The survey outlines the advantages and limitations of each strategy, offering insights to guide future traffic control research.

Abstract

During the last 60 years, incessant efforts have been made to improve the efficiency of traffic control systems to meet ever-increasing traffic demands. Some recent works attempt to enhance traffic efficiency via vehicle-to-vehicle communications. In this paper, we aim to give a survey of some research frontiers in this trend, identifying early-stage key technologies and discussing potential benefits that will be gained. Our survey focuses on the control side and aims to highlight that the design philosophy for traffic control systems is undergoing a transition from feedback character to feedforward character. Moreover, we discuss some contrasting preferences in the design of traffic control systems and their relations to vehicular communications. The first pair of contrasting preferences are model-based predictive control versus simulation-based predictive control. The second pair are global planning-based control versus local self-organization-based control. The third pair are control using rich information that may be highly redundant versus control using concise information that is necessary. Both the potentials and drawbacks of these control strategies are explained. We hope these comparisons can shed some interesting light on future traffic control studies.