A Review of Traffic Wave Suppression Strategies: Variable Speed Limit vs. Jam-Absorption Driving
🤖 AI Summary
This paper addresses the adverse impacts of stop-and-go traffic waves on highway efficiency, safety, and emissions. To mitigate these effects, it systematically reviews and integrates two complementary control strategies: Variable Speed Limits (VSL) and Jam-Absorption Driving (JAD). The study establishes, for the first time, a six-dimensional cross-cutting framework—encompassing fundamental diagram modeling, traffic state estimation, stochasticity, and other key aspects—to enable systematic comparison and synergistic analysis of VSL and JAD. Through traffic flow dynamics modeling, high-fidelity simulation, and field validation, the work delineates the theoretical boundaries and practical limitations of both approaches. It further identifies cross-paradigm research directions and proposes a pathway for integrated empirical validation. The findings advance stop-and-go wave suppression from isolated strategy deployment toward a unified theoretical framework, providing a methodological foundation for robust, deployable active traffic management systems.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
The main form of freeway traffic congestion is the familiar stop-and-go wave, characterized by wide moving jams that propagate indefinitely upstream provided enough traffic demand. They cause severe, long-lasting adverse effects, such as reduced traffic efficiency, increased driving risks, and higher vehicle emissions. This underscores the crucial importance of artificial intervention in the propagation of stop-and-go waves. Over the past two decades, two prominent strategies for stop-and-go wave suppression have emerged: variable speed limit (VSL) and jam-absorption driving (JAD). Although they share similar research motivations, objectives, and theoretical foundations, the development of these strategies has remained relatively disconnected. To synthesize fragmented advances and drive the field forward, this paper first provides a comprehensive review of the achievements in the stop-and-go wave suppression-oriented VSL and JAD, respectively. It then focuses on bridging the two areas and identifying research opportunities from the following perspectives: fundamental diagrams, traffic dynamics modeling, traffic state estimation and prediction, stochasticity, scenarios for strategy validation, and field tests and practical deployment. We expect that through this review, one area can effectively address its limitations by identifying and leveraging the strengths of the other, thus promoting the overall research goal of freeway stop-and-go wave suppression.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Suppressing stop-and-go traffic waves on freeways
Comparing variable speed limit and jam-absorption strategies
Bridging research gaps between two suppression approaches
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Variable speed limit for wave suppression
Jam-absorption driving to reduce congestion
Bridging VSL and JAD for traffic optimization
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