Can Connected Autonomous Vehicles really improve mixed traffic efficiency in realistic scenarios?

TL;DR

This study assesses how connected autonomous vehicles can enhance traffic flow in realistic mixed-traffic environments, considering imperfect communication and large-scale networks, revealing significant efficiency gains at high penetration rates under reliable communication.

Contribution

It investigates the impact of unreliable communication on CAV performance in mixed traffic within large-scale networks, a realistic scenario previously underexplored.

Findings

CAVs improve traffic efficiency significantly at high penetration rates.

Communication reliability critically affects CAV benefits, with high packet loss reducing efficiency gains.

Traffic congestion increases notably with communication failures, especially at higher penetration rates.

Abstract

Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) can supplement the information from their own sensors with information from surrounding CAVs for decision making and control. This has the potential to improve traffic efficiency. CAVs face additional challenges in their driving, however, when they interact with human-driven vehicles (HDVs) in mixed-traffic environments due to the uncertainty in human's driving behavior e.g. larger reaction times, perception errors, etc. While a lot of research has investigated the impact of CAVs on traffic safety and efficiency at different penetration rates, all have assumed either perfect communication or very simple scenarios with imperfect communication. In practice, the presence of communication delays and packet losses means that CAVs might receive only partial information from surrounding vehicles, and this can have detrimental effects on their performance. This paper investigates the impact of CAVs on traffic efficiency in realistic communication and road network scenarios (i.e. imperfect communication and large-scale road network). We analyze the effect of unreliable communication links on CAVs operation in mixed traffic with various penetration rates and evaluate traffic performance in congested traffic scenarios on a large-scale road network (the M50 motorway, in Ireland). Results show that CAVs can significantly improve traffic efficiency in congested traffic scenarios at high penetration rates. The scale of the improvement depends on communication reliability, with a packet drop rate of 70% leading to an increase in traffic congestion by 28.7% and 11.88% at 40% and 70% penetration rates respectively compared to perfect communication.