This paper aims to reduce the merging time of on-ramp vehicles by utilizing a hierarchical control architecture including a decision-maker and an operational controller. The two controllers use the same second-order vehicle dynamics model, but the tactical controller establishes merging sequences by minimizing the merging time of on-ramp vehicles and employs linear models to generate vehicular acceleration, representing the trajectory planning process formulated as a Model Predictive Control problem by the operational layer controller, subject to constraints on vehicular acceleration, speed and inter-vehicle distance for practical usage. The proposed method to decrease the merging time of on-ramp vehicles and a first-in-first-out method are tested under different initial settings, including initial vehicular speeds, locations, and desired time gaps, and with mainline vehicles starting from equilibrium or non-equilibrium states. The simulation results show that the proposed method works well to improve traffic efficiency.

CICTP