Stability and capacity for heterogeneous traffic flow mixed with vehicles in multiple controls

Abstract

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is regarded as a promising approach to improve traffic stability and capacity by operating vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. However, the beneficial effect of CACC vehicles is greatly reduced due to the influence of manually driven vehicles (MDVs) in the heterogeneous traffic flow, in which the degradation of CACC vehicles is a considerable problem. One proposed solution is to install communication devices for MDVs, called IMDVs, to propagate information to CACC vehicles and prevent the degradation. This study analyzed the traffic flow configuration by introducing IMDVs and considering multiple traffic flow operations, e.g. vehicle degradation and platoon formation. Then, multiple factors, including market penetration rate, platoon length, and information flow topology, were taken into consideration in the theoretical modelling of linear stability and fundamental diagram. Finally, we verified the high accuracy of theoretical analysis by numerical experiments and gave some reasonable recommendations for traffic management.