Abstract
Self-driven vehicles are being actively developed. When widespread, they will help reduce the number of traffic accidents and ease traffic congestion. They will coexist with human-driven vehicles for years. If there is a mismatch between human drivers’ operations and the judgments of self-driven vehicles, congestion may arise at an unsignalized intersection, in particular, where roads are prioritized. Vehicles on the low-priority road attempting to cross, or turn to, the priority road can significantly reduce the traffic flow. We have proposed a yielding protocol to deal with this problem and evaluated it using a simulation that focused on traffic flow efficiency at an intersection. In the simulation, we have varied the number of vehicles coming into the roads and the percentage of self-driven vehicles and confirmed that the proposed yielding protocol could improve the traffic flow of vehicles on the low-priority road.
Highlights
With a view to making road traffic in Japan the safest in the world, the Japanese government is pushing ahead with the research and development of self-driven vehicle systems as a national project
The response time of a human-driven vehicle can be much longer than that of a self-driven vehicle because the driver observes the surroundings, selects one of the alternative decisions based on the understanding of the surrounding situation and operates the vehicle based on the selected decision
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Summary
With a view to making road traffic in Japan the safest in the world, the Japanese government is pushing ahead with the research and development of self-driven vehicle systems as a national project. It is further assumed that self-driven vehicles are completely automatic In this yielding protocol, a vehicle on the low-priority road (hereafter “low-priority vehicle”) that wants to cross, or turn to, the priority road stops in front of the intersection and sends a yielding request to vehicles on the priority road (hereafter “priority vehicles”). We have evaluated the extent to which the proposed yielding protocol improves the traffic of low-priority vehicles. For this purpose, we have used simulation to examine how the protocol affects various traffic indicators concerning low-priority vehicles: Intersection passing rate, average number of stops, average stop time, average driving distance, average driving speed, and road occupancy of low-speed vehicles.
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