Energy-optimal Speed Regulation for CAVs in Urban Mixed Traffic with Induced Lane Changes

Existing urban energy-optimal vehicle speed regulation (eco-driving) studies were mostly carried out on single-lane roads or did not consider lane changes, delivering overidealized eco-driving results. In addition to lane changes that every vehicle may encounter on roads, the eco-driving connected automated vehicles (CAVs) are subject to induced types of lane changes of manually-driven vehicles (MVs), a cut-in of an MV to the front of a CAV from an adjacent lane, and an escape of an MV from behind a CAV to an adjacent lane. So far, very few studies have considered the impact of lane changes while designing the ecodriving strategies and evaluated the eco-driving performance with respect to lane-changing disturbances in credible simulation environments; and almost no existing work has addressed both lateral and longitudinal disturbances for eco-driving. This paper has developed a generic and deployable eco-driving strategy for CAVs under a unified rolling-horizon optimal control framework that can deal with both longitudinal and lateral disturbances of MVs without assuming communications between CAVs and MVs. The performance of this disturbance-rejection eco-driving strategy was thoroughly evaluated with regard to a multilane urban network, using the microscopic traffic simulator SUMO. The strategy was demonstrated very effective and robust, and similar results were little reported before.