Evaluation of Priority Rules for Entrance to Automated Highways

Automated highway systems are envisioned to provide capacity improvements over conventional highways by controlling vehicle trajectories and regulating entrance, egress and lane-changing. This paper examines the entrance process with mixed vehicle classes and prioritization on an AHS with plalooning, Queueing statistics are estimated for different prioritization schemes, which account for vehicle size and spacing characteristics. Experiments indicate that capacity is increased substantially, and queueing is reduced substantially, when priority is given to vehicles that fall in the same class as the platoon that precedes the current gap in the right-hand lane of the highway.