Impact of Autonomous Vehicles on Curved Road Traffic Flow

Abstract

This paper presents a novel cellular automata model, with the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the curved road traffic. Impacts of AVs are studied, and the coupling effects of parameters such as AVs’ maximum velocity, AVs’ penetrance ratio, and the road bend radius on mixed traffic flow are explored. Simulations are conducted under periodic boundary condition. Results show that AVs play a positive role on the improvement of system capacity, and congestion avoidance. Moreover, great maximum velocity of AVs and large bend radius of the curved road will be effective on the mixed traffic flow. The capacity with pure AVs demonstrates 1.57 times of that with pure HVs under specific parameters, due to the unique characteristics of AVs, such as not random slowing down during traveling, and almost lossless safety deceleration probability through information and vehicle communication. Finally discussions about the congestion mechanism on the curved road are exhibited.

Keywords: Autonomous vehicles, Curved road, mixed traffic flow, Cellular automata