Lane and Platoon Assignment in Intelligent Transportation System: A Novel Heuristic Approach

The right lane and platoon assignment to a vehicle significantly impacts achieving the desired driving goals to improve occupants’ safety or reduce pollution. Preparing an intelligent assistant to address this issue has exposed researchers’ attention, especially in intelligent transportation systems. Implementing such a system is complex and challenging to design, mainly because of conflicting driving goals possibility and the mixed traffic of autonomous and human-driven vehicles. This paper presents a multi-tier computational architecture to utilize the cloud, fog, and edge computational resources and formulate the lane/platoon assignment as an optimization problem subject to safety combined with any other secondary goal. The problem is then solved by the meta-heuristic Genetic Algorithm. By evaluating the proposed method by real data gathering, machine learning, and numerical experiments, the results show that the proposed method satisfies the minimization of overlapping collision areas during vehicles’ lane/platoon changes and harmonizes the traffic in all lanes and each platoon.