A Novel Congestion Avoidance Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles Assessed by Queue Modeling

Autonomous vehicle (AV) fleet management is one of the major aspects of AV development that needs to be standardized before AV deployment. There has been no consensus on whether AV deployment in general will be beneficial or detrimental in terms of road congestion. There are similarities between packet transmission in computer networks and AV transportation in road networks. In this work, the authors argue that congestion avoidance algorithms used in computer networks can be applied for AV fleet management. Authors modify and evaluate a novel adaptation of additive increase and multiplicative decrease (AMID) congestion avoidance algorithm. The authors propose assigning different priorities to transportation tasks in order to facilitate sharing the limited resources in such as usage of the road network. This will be modeled and assessed using a queueing model based on AVs arrival distribution. This will result in a load balancing paradigm that can be used to share and manage limited resources. Then, by using numerical study authors merge congestion avoidance and load balancing to analyze the authors' scheme in term of road network throughput (number of cars in network for a given time) for AV fleet management. Their evaluation demonstrates the improvement in terms of road network throughput.