Simulation Framework for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control with Empirical DSRC Module

Wireless communication plays a vital role in the promising performance of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technology. This paper proposes a Vissim-based microscopic traffic simulation framework with an analytical dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) module for packet reception. Being derived from ns-2, a packet-level network simulator, the DSRC probability module takes into account the imperfect wireless communication that occurs in real-world deployment. Four managed lane deployment strategies are evaluated using the proposed framework. While the average packet reception rate is above 93\% among all tested scenarios, the results reveal that the reliability of the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication can be influenced by the deployment strategies. Additionally, the proposed framework exhibits desirable scalability for traffic simulation and it is able to evaluate transportation-network-level deployment strategies in the near future for CAV technologies.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure, 44th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Societ

A Co-Simulation Study to Assess the Impacts of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles on Traffic Flow Stability during Hurricane Evacuation

Hurricane evacuation has become a major problem for the coastal residents of the United States. Devastating hurricanes have threatened the lives and infrastructure of coastal communities and caused billions of dollars in damage. There is a need for better traffic management strategies to improve the safety and mobility of evacuation traffic. In this study hurricane evacuation traffic was simulated using SUMO a microscopic traffic simulation model. The effects of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) were evaluated using two approaches. (i) Using the state-of-the-art car-following models available in SUMO and (ii) a co-simulation study by integrating the microscopic traffic simulation model with a separate communication simulator to find the realistic effect of CAVs on evacuation traffic. A road network of I-75 in Florida was created to represent real-world evacuation traffic observed in Hurricane Irma s evacuation periods. Simulation experiments were performed by creating mixed traffic scenarios with 25, 50, 75 and 100 percentages of different vehicle technologies including CAVs or AVs and human-driven vehicles. HDV Simulation results suggest that the CACC car-following model, implemented in SUMO and commonly used in the literature to represent CAVs, produces highly unstable results On the other hand the ACC car following model, used to represent AVs, produces better and more stable results. However, in a co-simulation study, to evaluate the effect of CAVs in the same evacuation traffic scenario, results indicate that with 25 percentage of CAVs the number of potential collisions decrease up to 42.5 percentage

Feasibility of expanding traffic monitoring systems with floating car data technology

Trajectory information reported by certain vehicles (Floating Car Data or FCD) can be applied to monitor the road network. Policy makers face difficulties when deciding to invest in the expansion of their infrastructure based on inductive loops and cameras, or to invest in a FCD system. This paper targets this decision. The provided FCD functionality is investigated, minimum requirements are determined and reliability issues are researched. The communication cost is derived and combined with other elements to assess the total costs for different scenarios. The outcome is to target a penetration rate of 1%, a sample interval of 10 seconds and a transmission interval of 30 seconds. Such a deployment can accurately determine the locations of incidents and traffic jams. It can also estimate travel times accurately for highways, for urban roads this is limited to a binary categorization into normal or congested traffic. No reliability issues are expected. The most cost efficient scenario when deploying a new FCD system is to launch a smartphone application. For Belgium, this costs 13 million EUR for 10 years. However, it is estimated that purchasing data from companies already acquiring FCD data through their own product could reduce costs with a factor 10

Lagrangian-based Hydrodynamic Model for Traffic Data Fusion on Freeways

This paper conducts a comprehensive study of the Lagrangian-based hydrodynamic model with application to highway state estimation. Our analysis is motivated by the practical problems of freeway traffic monitoring and estimation using multi-source data measured from mobile devices and fixed sensors. We conduct rigorous mathematical analysis on the Hamilton-Jacobi representation of the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards model in the transformed coordinates, and derive explicit and closed-form solutions with piecewise affine initial, boundary, and internal conditions, based on the variational principle. A numerical study of the Mobile Century field experiment demonstrates some unique features and the effectiveness in traffic estimation of the Lagrangian-based model