Mitigation of stop-and-go traffic waves with intelligent vehicles at low market penetration rates

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how different adaptive cruise control strategies, especially multi-vehicle anticipation, can reduce stop-and-go traffic waves at low market penetration rates, showing significant benefits even with minimal automated vehicle presence.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic framework for comparing ACC strategies and provides quantitative analysis of their effectiveness at low market penetration rates.

Findings

Multi-vehicle anticipation nearly matches full connectivity in mitigating traffic waves.

Partial connectivity requires higher market penetration to be effective.

Even 1% market penetration of advanced ACC can significantly reduce stop-and-go patterns.

Abstract

Stop-and-go traffic patterns sometimes manifest on roadways without any discernible congestion triggers. Such a phenomenon has been observed on homogeneous ring roads without lane changes. With the development of vehicle technology and measurement sensors, multiple researchers have focused on studying the influence of automated vehicles on traffic. In particular, there is a focus on the design of string-stable adaptive cruise control (ACC) strategies to dampen stop-and-go waves. However, there is no systematic comparison among different strategies nor a quantitative analysis of the oscillation reduction at low market penetration rates (MPRs). This paper proposes a framework to evaluate the impact of low MPRs across multiple ACC strategies. Then, through Monte Carlo simulations, our findings indicate that multi-vehicle anticipation technology yields nearly equivalent benefits in mitigating stop-and-go patterns compared to full vehicular connectivity, even at a modest MPR of 1\%. In contrast, partial connectivity among vehicles only eliminates stop-and-go waves if the MPR is larger.