A time-varying driving style oriented model predictive control for smoothing mixed traffic flow

Abstract

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have great potential to smooth mixed traffic flow. To focus on the fact that the driving styles of HDVs are time-varying, a new control framework based on time-varying model predictive control (MPC) is proposed for mixed traffic flow in longitudinal control. Firstly, a genetic algorithm can be employed to calibrate the parameters of the car-following model based on offline trajectory data, representing the long-term driving style of HDVs. Secondly, the short-term driving style is recognized through modifying the long-term driving style based on real-time trajectory data within a sliding window. Then, this paper seeks to design a time-varying MPC control framework to realize a smoother mixed traffic flow. Finally, compared to the baseline model, the method we proposed achieves the high-performance both in fuel consumption and driving comfort under various scenarios, and maintains fast online calculations. Besides, it also displays the significant potential of saving fuel consumption in a large-scale traffic system, reducing by over 11.28% with 17∼33% penetration rates of CAVs.