A new control strategy of CAVs platoon for mitigating traffic oscillation in a two-lane highway

Abstract

With the development of autonomous driving technology, designing connected automated vehicles (CAVs) control strategies to mitigate traffic oscillations has become a hot topic. Most current control strategies are mainly oriented to single-lane highway scenarios and do not consider vehicles' lane-changing behaviors. To address the gap, this paper proposes the Follower-Stopper-Platoon (FSP) strategy, which attempts to mitigate traffic oscillation by controlling a platoon of CAVs in a two-lane scenario. Firstly, based on the Follower-Stopper (FS) control and considering CAVs' platoon behaviors, this paper proposes the FSP strategy and compares it with two comparative strategies, the Baseline and FS strategies. Then, a two-lane mixed traffic flow cellular automata model is developed and used to verify the effectiveness of the FSP strategy. Finally, this study demonstrates the efficacy of the FSP strategy by designing simulation experiments and analyzes the effect of CAVs' platoon size on the control effect. The result shows that (1) the FSP strategy can overcome the shortcomings of the FS control and will increase traffic flow speed while mitigating traffic oscillations. (2) In a two-lane scenario, as penetration rates of CAVs and traffic densities increase, the FSP strategy's advantages in mitigating traffic oscillations, reducing energy consumption and pollutant emissions, and improving speed and passenger comfort are gradually apparent. (3) Under the FSP strategy, the larger the maximum size of the CAVs platoon, the better the performance of the mixed traffic flow in terms of traffic efficiency, stability, fuel consumption, and pollutant emission.