Combined Safety and Coordination of Connected Automated Vehicles in Merging Area with Featuring Optimal Merging Positions

Abstract

Freeway on-ramp merging area is deemed to be typical bottlenecks section, which leads to low traffic efficiency, congestions, and frequent accidents. Most existing studies on merging for the connected and automated vehicles focus on merging at a single fixed merging point. However, the problem of coordination between merging vehicle and arterial traffic flow in the acceleration lane is ignored in the existing studies. This study proposes a merging model, which combined safety and coordination of CAVs with featuring optimal merging positions. The proposed model has two stages: one is analysis of merging velocity of the insertable gap and the other one is determining constraint condition of cooperative merging. The outputs of first stage are interval of merging speed and the mergeable range. The outputs of second stage are optional insertable gap and the corresponding driving scheme. Then, a traffic simulation experiment is designed to evaluate the proposed model. The simulation results show that the proposed model can effectively guarantee driving safety and make the merging process smoother with 28.7% reduction in travel time for the CAV merging. Furthermore, the proposed model does not sacrifice the interests of surrounding traffic to assist in CAV merging. The results indicate the promising potential of using the proposed methods can approximately get a fair use of road resources for each CAV.