Transforming Police-Car Swerving for Mitigating Isolated Stop-and-Go Traffic Waves: A Practice-Oriented Jam-Absorption Driving Strategy

Abstract

Stop-and-go traffic waves, a major form of freeway congestion, impose severe and persistent adverse impacts, including reduced traffic efficiency, increased safety risks, and elevated vehicle emissions. Among various freeway traffic management strategies, jam-absorption driving (JAD), in which a dedicated vehicle performs "slow-in" and "fast-out" maneuvers before being captured by a stop-and-go wave, has been proposed as a promising approach to suppressing the propagation of such waves. However, most existing JAD strategies remain impractical, primarily due to the lack of consideration of implementation vehicles and operational conditions. Inspired by real-world observations of police-car swerving behavior, this paper first introduces the Single-Vehicle Double-Detector Jam-Absorption Driving (SD-JAD) problem and then proposes a practical JAD strategy based on a definition of the JAD Triangle, transforming such behavior into a traffic control strategy capable of suppressing the propagation of an isolated stop-and-go wave. Five key parameters that significantly affect the proposed strategy, namely JAD speed, inflow traffic speed, wave width, wave speed, and in-wave speed, are identified and systematically analyzed. Using a SUMO-based simulation as an illustrative example, we further demonstrate how these parameters can be measured in practice using only two stationary roadside traffic detectors. The results show that the proposed JAD strategy successfully suppresses the propagation of a stop-and-go wave without triggering secondary waves. This paper is expected to take a significant step toward the practical implementation of JAD, advancing it from a theoretical concept to a feasible and deployable traffic management strategy.