Safety benefit of cooperative control for heterogeneous traffic on-ramp merging

Abstract

The safety of heterogeneous traffic is a vital topic in the oncoming era of autonomous vehicles (AVs). The cooperative vehicle infrastructure system (CVIS) is considered to improve heterogeneous traffic safety by connecting and controlling AVs cooperatively, and the connected AVs are so-called connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). However, the safety impact of cooperative control strategy on the heterogeneous traffic with CAVs and human-driving vehicles (HVs) has not been well investigated. In this paper, based on the traffic simulator SUMO, we designed a typical highway scenario of on-ramp merging and adopted a cooperative control method for CAVs. We then compared the safety performance for two different heterogeneous traffic systems, i.e. AV and HV, CAV and HV, respectively, to illustrate the safety benefits of the cooperative control strategy. We found that the safety performance of the CAV and HV traffic system does not always outperform that of AV and HV. With random departSpeed and higher arrival rate, the proposed cooperative control method would decrease the conflicts significantly whereas the penetration rate is over 80%. We further investigated the conflicts in terms of the leading and following vehicle types, and found that the risk of a AV/CAV followed by a HV is twice that of a HV followed by another HV. We also considered the safety effect of communication failure, and found that there is no significant impact until the packet loss probability is greater than 30%, while communication delay’s impact on safety can be ignored according to our experiments.