Modeling System Dynamics of Mixed Traffic With Partial Connected and Automated Vehicles

This research aims to model system dynamics for mixed traffic flow consisting of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) and Human-driven Vehicles (HVs). It quantifies the impact of CAVs’ speed change on the overall traffic state on a real-time basis. The model describes the impedance of CAVs’ speed reduction on traffic flow and considers the impact of potential additional lane change induced by the speed reduction. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, a VISSIM based microscopic simulation evaluation is performed. The results confirm that the accuracy of the proposed model is generally over 80% with the CAVs’ speed reduction constrained within 20 km/h. Sensitivity analysis is conducted in terms of various CAV penetration rates and congestion levels. The proposed model demonstrates consistently good performance across all CAV penetration rates and congestion levels. A showcase is presented to show the effect of the system dynamics in active traffic management. The proposed model could serve as the foundation of CAV based traffic management applications, such as variable speed limit and speed harmonization.