Collaborative Strategies and Simulation of Vehicle Group Behaviors for Off-Ramp Areas

Tong Mo,Keyi Li,Zhufei Huang,Haijian Li,Junjie Zhang,Lingqiao Qin,Hesham Rakha

doi:10.1155/2020/8817364

Abstract

With the increase of vehicle ownership and the rapid growth of urban traffic, the problem of congestion in the off-ramp area of the main expressway has become the main factor restricting overall section efficiency and inducing traffic accidents. This paper focuses on the problem of group collaborative lane-changing behaviors of off-ramp vehicles and through vehicles in off-ramp areas and proposes four kinds of vehicle group collaborative strategies based on different road space balance conditions. According to a three-lane expressway scene, a VISSIM-based simulation model is built and the optimization scheme is simulated and evaluated. The simulation results show that with the increase of traffic flow in off-ramp areas, a flow-balance strategy for downstream lanes where off-ramp vehicles merge with the outside lane in advance is more advantageous. When vehicles are leaving the main road, if traffic flow is heavy, the flow-balance strategy for lanes where off-ramp vehicles merge with the outside lane in advance (for example, the proportion of off-ramp vehicles in three lanes is 0 : 0 : 1) is better; otherwise, when the traffic flow on the main road is relatively small, the flow-balance strategy for lanes where off-ramp vehicles are distributed in lanes with different ratios (e.g., 1 : 3 : 6) is better. What is more, for future traffic management in connected vehicle environments, it can be concluded that collaborative vehicle lane-changing strategies with different traffic flow states can help to enhance traffic efficiency.

Highlights

With an increase in traffic volume in off-ramp areas, the lane-changing behavior of vehicles in the deceleration lane on the expressway often causes the mainline traffic flow disorder. erefore, off-ramp areas are easy to become the “bottleneck” that affects the efficiency and safety of the expressway.For economic and environmental reasons, the expansion of existing infrastructure is not always a viable option.erefore, traffic control has been proposed and used as an effective strategy to alleviate highway congestion problems [1]
To improve the efficiency of the off-ramp in the connected vehicle environment, this paper focuses on the problem of group collaborative lane-changing behaviors of off-ramp vehicles and through vehicles in off-ramp areas and proposes four kinds of vehicle group collaborative strategies based on different road space balance conditions
To study the flow-balance strategies for upstream lane, this section analyzes the influence of different lateral spatial distributions of traffic flow on the traffic characteristics and the driving behaviors of drivers of the offramp area through VISSIM simulation, to study the control strategy based on the lateral spatial distribution of ramp vehicle flow

Summary

Introduction

Erefore, traffic control has been proposed and used as an effective strategy to alleviate highway congestion problems [1]. To prevent potential queue spillover, Yang et al [3] introduced the off-ramp queue estimation model. It included three primary functions: off-ramp queue estimation, arterial adaptive signal operations, and freeway off-ramp priority control, which could improve traffic control efficiency over the entire corridor. Ma et al [4] constructed the coordinated optimal control model of mainline and ramp, which could effectively balance the uneven distribution of traffic rights between the main road and ramp in the upper reaches of the merging area and eventually reduce the average traffic delay in the road network. Aiming at reducing the total travel time and the emissions in freeway traffic networks, Pasquale et al [5] proposed a multiclass control

Methods

Results

Conclusion