Abstract
Despite the fact that significant research efforts have been made to the traffic flow theory of autonomous vehicles and manual vehicles, few existing studies have incorporated different modes of both vehicles in their analysis. In this study, we develop a cellular automata simulation model to investigate the impact of different modes of autonomous vehicles (autonomous car, autonomous bus, and autonomous micro car) and conventional vehicles (manual car, manual bus, and manual micro car) on the characteristics of traffic flow. A new type of autonomous mode, i.e., autonomous micro car, is investigated in the model to study the effects of this vehicle mode on the overall capacity of the network. Furthermore, two types of lane-changing behavior, i.e., aggressive lane changing and polite lane changing, are incorporated into the model. The results reveal that micro cars (manual and autonomous) have the potential to reduce traffic congestions and increase the capacity or flow rate (vehicles/hour) of the road. Where the average vehicle occupancy is less than 2, if autonomous micro cars are deployed alongside autonomous cars, the flow rate (vehicles/hour) can be increased significantly. The results highlight the significance of the autonomous micro cars to traffic flow, passenger occupancy, and road capacity.
Highlights
Traffic congestion is a problem which is severely affecting daily commutes. e possible implications of conventional vehicles in terms of density, capacity, level of service, delay, peaks in fuel prices, environmental and pollution issues, parking issues, policies on taxation, etc. have been thoroughly investigated in the modern scenarios
We have developed a cellular automata (CA) model to capture the intricate details in traffic movements for this study. ere are several characteristics relating to the perception and reaction of autonomous vehicles which differ from manual vehicles
In scenarios 1 to 5, the values of aggressive lane change (ALC) and polite lane change (PLC) are changed by keeping the traffic composition in each scenario constant to focus on the effect of lane-changing behavior of different vehicles on overall flow. e values of ALC and PLC range from 0.0 to 1.0 with 0.2 intervals
Summary
Traffic congestion is a problem which is severely affecting daily commutes. e possible implications of conventional vehicles in terms of density, capacity, level of service, delay, peaks in fuel prices, environmental and pollution issues, parking issues, policies on taxation, etc. have been thoroughly investigated in the modern scenarios. Have been thoroughly investigated in the modern scenarios. E possible implications of conventional vehicles in terms of density, capacity, level of service, delay, peaks in fuel prices, environmental and pollution issues, parking issues, policies on taxation, etc. Such complexities have forced the community to transition from conventional vehicular modes to alternative ones. Ere are several problems that are currently faced by conventional vehicles [1]. A conventional car can carry at most 5 people while one micro car caries 2, the average occupancy is usually less than 2. The carrying capacity can be ignored, especially in high motorized countries [2]. e term “micro car” describes a class of vehicle, generally two-door, two-seater, and less than 3 meters in length [1, 3]
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