Assessing the Impact of CAV Driving Strategies on Mixed Traffic on the Ring Road and Freeway

Abstract

The increasing traffic congestion has led to several negative consequences, with traffic oscillation being a major contributor to the problem. To mitigate traffic waves, the impact of the connected automated vehicles (CAVs) equipped with adaptive cruise control (ACC), FollowerStopper (FS), and jam-absorption driving (JAD) strategies on circular and linear scenarios have been evaluated. The manual vehicle is the intelligent driver model (IDM) and human driver model (HDM), respectively. The results suggest that on the ring road, the traffic performance of mixed traffic improves gradually with the increase of the proportion of CAVs under the ACC. Moreover, the traffic performance for the JAD strategy does not improve infinitely with the increase in the number of CAVs. Conversely, the FS strategy suppresses traffic waves at the cost of reducing traffic flow, and more CAVs are not beneficial for mixed traffic. It is interesting to note that under optimal performance in these three strategies, the FS strategy has the lowest number of CAVs, while the ACC strategy has the highest number of CAVs. For the linear road, it demonstrates that the JAD strategy exhibits a superior performance compared to the ACC. However, the FS strategy cannot dissipate traffic waves due to an insufficient buffer gap. Different models have varying effects on different strategies.