Optimal routing for intelligent vehicle highway systems using mixed integer linear programming

We present a routing guidance approach that can be used in Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS). We consider IVHS consisting of automated highway systems on which intelligent vehicles organized in platoons drive to their destination, controlled by a hierarchical control framework. In this framework there are roadside controllers that provide speed and lane allocation instructions to the platoons. These roadside controllers typically manage single stretches of highways. A collection of highways is then supervised by so-called area controllers that mainly take care of the route guidance instructions for the platoons and that also coordinate the various roadside controllers in their area. In this paper we focus on the optimal route choice control problem for the area controllers. In general, this problem is a nonlinear integer optimization problemwith high computational requirements, which makes the problem intractable in practice. Therefore, we first propose a simplified but fast simulation model to describe the flows of platoons in the network. Next, we show that the optimal route choice control problem can be approximated by a linear or a mixed integer linear problem. With a simple case study we illustrate that this results in a balanced trade-off between optimality and computational efficiency.