The impacts of a communication based merging assistant on traffic flows of manual and equipped vehicles at an on-ramp using traffic flow simulation

Abstract

This paper presents a decentralized merging assistant for mixed traffic situations aiming to increase traffic flow stability around the merging area by minimizing the conflict and limiting the changes in speed. The algorithm encourages early and smooth deceleration of the mainline vehicles upstream of the merging area in order to create gap for ramp vehicle. Simulation results show that the effectiveness of the merging assistant can be different depending on traffic conditions and compositions. A negative side effect that reduces the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is found and some ideas to solve this problem are discussed.