Safety benefit of cooperative control for heterogeneous traffic on-ramp merging
Journal article, 2022

The safety of heterogeneous traffic is a vital topic in the oncoming era of autonomous vehicles (AVs). The cooperative vehicle infrastructure system (CVIS) is considered to improve heterogeneous traffic safety by connecting and controlling AVs cooperatively, and the connected AVs are so-called connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). However, the safety impact of cooperative control strategy on the heterogeneous traffic with CAVs and human-driving vehicles (HVs) has not been well investigated. In this paper, based on the traffic simulator SUMO, we designed a typical highway scenario of on-ramp merging and adopted a cooperative control method for CAVs. We then compared the safety performance for two different heterogeneous traffic systems, i.e. AV and HV, CAV and HV, respectively, to illustrate the safety benefits of the cooperative control strategy. We found that the safety performance of the CAV and HV traffic system does not always outperform that of AV and HV. With random departSpeed and higher arrival rate, the proposed cooperative control method would decrease the conflicts significantly whereas the penetration rate is over 80%. We further investigated the conflicts in terms of the leading and following vehicle types, and found that the risk of a AV/CAV followed by a HV is twice that of a HV followed by another HV. We also considered the safety effect of communication failure, and found that there is no significant impact until the packet loss probability is greater than 30%, while communication delay's impact on safety can be ignored according to our experiments.

heterogeneous traffic flow

cooperative control

traffic simulation

communication failure

on-ramp merging

Traffic safety

Author

Xiao Jing

Tsinghua University

Xin Pei

Tsinghua University

Song Yan

Tsinghua University

Chunyang Han

Tsinghua University

Selpi Selpi

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Data Science and AI

Eleonora Andreotti

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Vehicle Safety

Jishiyu Ding

Tsinghua University

Transportation Safety and Environment

2631-6765 (ISSN) 2631-4428 (eISSN)

Vol. 4 4 tdac031

Heterogeneous Traffic Groups Cooperative Driving Behaviours Research under Mixed Traffic Condition

VINNOVA (2018-02891), 2019-04-01 -- 2021-03-31.

Subject Categories

Transport Systems and Logistics

Infrastructure Engineering

Vehicle Engineering

DOI

10.1093/tse/tdac031

More information

Latest update

10/27/2023