Influence of CAV clustering strategies on mixed traffic flow characteristics: An analysis of vehicle trajectory data

Abstract

Being one of the most promising applications enabled by connected and automated vehicles (CAV) technology, Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is expected to be deployed in the near term on public roads. Thus far, the majority of the CACC studies have been focusing on the overall network performance with limited insights on the potential impacts of CAVs on human-driven vehicles (HVs). This paper aims to quantify such impacts by studying the high-resolution vehicle trajectory data that are obtained from microscopic simulation. Two platoon clustering strategies for CACC- an ad hoc coordination strategy and a local coordination strategy-are implemented. Results show that the local coordination outperforms the ad hoc coordination across all tested market penetration rates (MPRs) in terms of network throughput and productivity. According to the two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, however, the distributions of the hard braking events (as a potential safety impact) for HVs change significantly under local coordination strategy. For both of the clustering strategy, CAVs increase the average lane change frequency for HVs. The break-even point for average lane change frequency between the two strategies is observed at 30% MPR, which decreases from 5.42 to 5.38 per vehicle. The average lane change frequency following a monotonically increasing pattern in response to MPR, and it reaches the highest 5.48 per vehicle at 40% MPR. Lastly, the interaction state of the car-following model for HVs is analyzed. It is revealed that the composition of the interaction state could be influenced by CAVs as well. One of the apparent trends is that the time spent on approaching state declines with the increasing presence of CAVs.