Cooperate and Navigate

Background:

Traffic capacity is limited in many regions of the United States due to the number of lanes of roads. For example, in the Greater Seattle area drivers experience long delays during peak traffic hours because the volume of traffic exceeds the designed capacity of the road networks. This is particularly pronounced on Interstates 5, 90, and 405, as well as State Route 520, the roads of particular interest for this problem.

Self-driving, cooperating cars have been proposed as a solution to increase capacity of highways without increasing number of lanes or roads. The behavior of these cars interacting with the existing traffic flow and each other is not well understood at this point.