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Increasing the spacing of vehicles dampens the effect of slowdowns by cars in front of a given car, so that the slowing is not amplified until it becomes a phantom jam, the researchers said.Ī video from the project shows a train of autonomous robots running along a track without bilateral control they eventually back up in phantom jams. With the help of engineering students at high schools in Maine, Horn and Wang have also built a robot simulation that shows how bilateral control can suppress phantom traffic jams. 'If we can increase the throughput on major highways, even if it's only by 50 percent, that would be a big deal,' Horn said. The main alternative to increasing traffic throughput per lane has been to build more lanes and more highways, and putting in new roads is very expensive, he said. 'Under reasonable conditions today, you might get 1,800 cars per lane per hour throughput,' Horn said: But 'with bilateral control, you could almost double that.' That would be in place of the default of most human drivers, which is to tailgate or 'ride the tailpipe' of the car in front of them by driving too close, Horn said. freeway could benefit from cars using bilateral control.

The researchers made computer models of real-world traffic conditions, showing how a typical U.S. 6, 2017, in the journal IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, shows how bilateral control can fight the problem.

New research by Horn and MIT postdoctoral associate Liang Wang, published Dec. And the researchers in the new study have calculated that solving phantom jams could save at least some of the estimated $121 billion per year that traffic congestion is estimated to cost the U.S. Traffic congestion is caused by a number of factors, such as roads that are poorly designed or over-capacity, localized factors like city traffic-lighting patterns, and events like accidents and construction.īut phantom traffic jams can make all those problems worse, Horn said. Such modifications, Horn said, could help fight phantom jams within a few years - maybe decades before an alternative solution, such as networked self-driving cars, becomes a reality on the roads. Horn calls this method of vehicle spacing bilateral control, and he said it could be achieved with relatively simple modifications to the adaptive cruise control (ACC) that many new cars already have.

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In essence, each driver would constantly make adjustments to keep his or her car roughly halfway between the car in front and the car behind. That is, it can prevent the slow-down effect from being amplified by the cars that follow behind, he said. Horn has been working on the problem of phantom traffic jams for years, and he has come up with a solution: By splitting the difference between the cars in front and the cars behind, the spacing of cars in a stream of traffic can act as a damper on phantom traffic jams.

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