Abstract
Vehicle automation and communication technologies are considered promising approaches to improve operational driving behavior. The expected gradual implementation of autonomous vehicles (AVs) shortly will cause unique impacts on the traffic flow characteristics. This paper focuses on reviewing the expected impacts under a mixed traffic environment of AVs and regular vehicles (RVs) considering different AV characteristics. The paper includes a policy implication discussion for possible actual future practice and research interests. The AV implementation has positive impacts on the traffic flow, such as improved traffic capacity and stability. However, the impact depends on the factors including penetration rate of the AVs, characteristics, and operational settings of the AVs, traffic volume level, and human driving behavior. The critical penetration rate, which has a high potential to improve traffic characteristics, was higher than 40%. AV’s intelligent control of operational driving is a function of its operational settings, mainly car-following modeling. Different adjustments of these settings may improve some traffic flow parameters and may deteriorate others. The position and distribution of AVs and the type of their leading or following vehicles may play a role in maximizing their impacts.
Highlights
The term autonomous vehicle (AV) is usually referred to as an autonomous vehicle that is considered a fully automated vehicle with level 5 automation without connectivity capabilities [1]
Despite covering an enormous body of literature, which is still growing, this study includes a systematic review that aimed at finding the impacts of different types of AVs (e.g., adaptive cruise control (ACC), cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), AV, CAV) on the traffic capacity and stability under mixed traffic environment with the regular vehicles (RVs) (Figure 1)
The findings indicated that the complete implementation of different AVs significantly increases the traffic capacity compared to a complete RV traffic environment
Summary
The term autonomous vehicle (AV) is usually referred to as an autonomous vehicle that is considered a fully automated vehicle with level 5 automation without connectivity capabilities [1]. It has a self-driving system that can perform all the driving and operational tasks without human conduction. AVs can be divided into connected and autonomous vehicles [1,2,3]. The term CV refers to any type of vehicle, including the RVs; with connectivity capabilities that access the information of their surrounding vehicles or the traffic infrastructure. The term AV may refer to different types of AVs in terms of vehicle automation
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