The advent of the autonomous car is paving the road to the realization of ideas that will help optimize traffic flows, increase safety and reduce fuel consumption, among other advantages. We present one proposal to bring together Virtual Traffics Lights (VTLs) and platooning in urban scenarios, leaning on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication protocols that turn intersections into virtual containers of data. Newly-introduced protocols for the combined management of VTLs and platoons are validated by simulation, comparing a range of routing protocols for the vehicular networks with the baseline given by common deployments of traditional traffic lights ruled by state-of-the-art policies. The simulation results show that the combination of VTLs and platoons can achieve significant reductions in travel times and fuel consumption, provided that proper algorithms are used to handle the V2V communications.
Keywords: Intelligent Transportation Systems; intersection intelligence; urban platooning; virtual traffic lights; virtualization.