Traffic Flow Stabilization Strategy for Mitigating Automated and Human Driven Vehicles Interactions

One of key challenges in the area of automated vehicles or self-driving cars is how to ensure smooth interactions between the automated vehicles and human driven vehicles. This is because it would be inevitable to have both automated vehicles and human driven vehicles until market penetration of automated vehicle reaches 100 percent. Our paper proposed traffic flow stabilization strategy based on optimal control theory and evaluated its performance using a microscopic traffic simulation tool under varying automated vehicle market penetrations. The simulation results indicated that the proposed approach effectively improves traffic flow stability when compared to the base case under adaptive cruise control algorithm.