Safety rule-based cellular automaton modeling and simulation under V2V environment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Vehicle to anything (V2X), especially vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology, is regarded as a promising technology to improve traffic efficiency and safety. Under V2V environment, drivers can communicate with each other, and obtain the real-time information of followers, besides of that from the preceding vehicle. According to the condition of sending a request of cooperative driving to the preceding vehicle, drivers are categorized into three sensitivity types, i.e. aggressive, normal and conservative. The mechanism of the driver's reaction to the backward request is also presented. Then, a safety rule-based cellular automaton (CA) model is developed, which involves bi-directional vehicular information. Finally, through numerical experiments, the influences of cooperative driving by V2V on traffic efficiency and safety are analyzed and concluded as follows. 1) The cooperative driving is conducive to improving the efficiency of vehicles to achieve their desired states when the speed constraint (of head vehicle) is serious; 2) The higher average danger coefficient is produced in the more congested vehicular fleet; 3) With regard to homogeneous vehicle fleets, more aggressive driving behaviors with V2V communication results in the lower safety performance, but can increase the traffic flux at synchronized flow and congested state; 4) As for heterogeneous vehicle fleets, the stimulation type, the sensitivity type, and the orders of sensitivity types all have an important effect in the safety performance.