Connected Cruise and Traffic Control for Pairs of Connected Automated Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper proposes a control strategy for connected automated vehicle pairs to improve traffic stability and flow in mixed traffic, demonstrating significant benefits even at moderate connectivity levels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel control approach for vehicle pairs that stabilizes mixed traffic and analyzes the impact of connectivity penetration on traffic stability.

Findings

Connected vehicle pairs improve traffic stability.

Moderate connectivity levels yield significant traffic benefits.

Proposed controllers outperform disconnected vehicle control.

Abstract

This paper considers mixed traffic consisting of connected automated vehicles equipped with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity and human-driven vehicles. A control strategy is proposed for communicating pairs of connected automated vehicles, where the two vehicles regulate their longitudinal motion by responding to each other, and, at the same time, stabilize the human-driven traffic between them. Stability analysis is conducted to find stabilizing controllers, and simulations are used to show the efficacy of the proposed approach. The impact of the penetration of connectivity and automation on the string stability of traffic is quantified. It is shown that, even with moderate penetration, connected automated vehicle pairs executing the proposed controllers achieve significant benefits compared to when these vehicles are disconnected and controlled independently.