Digital Twin-Assisted Lane-changing and Variable Speed Limit Control for Weaving Segments

With the rapid growth of traffic demand, the lane-changing concentration problem of weaving segments is significant on the highway, resulting in decreased operation efficiency and road safety. The cooperative intelligence transportation system (C-ITS) with vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology provides the possibility for emerging new cooperative strategies to alleviate that problem. Most of the existing V2X-assisted traffic control strategies assume that communication and connection between vehicles are perfect, which does not reflect reality. To accurately describe the dynamics of vehicular traffic and node connections, a joint traffic and network simulator is established to construct the digital twin system, where two traffic control strategies, namely the lane-changing (LC) distribution strategy and the variable speed limit (VSL) control strategy, are proposed and validated in a complex vehicular communication network. The simulation results show that packet loss negatively affects the performance of V2X-assisted LC control, and the integrated strategy improves the overall average speed by up to 40.4%, compared with the LC control alone.