Automated cooperative control of multilane freeway merging areas in connected and autonomous vehicle environments

Abstract

This study provides an automated cooperative control method in multilane freeway merging areas within the connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology. First, a lane-change model for a mainline vehicle considering the ramp traffic demand is proposed to determine which vehicles should change lanes from the outer lane to the inner lane of the upstream mainline in the merging area. Second, the time window of the on-ramp vehicles entering the mainline is defined based on the safe headway time and acceleration time. Then, a linear programming cooperative decision model is adopted for the merging vehicles in a given time window. A typical scene of a two-lane freeway merging area is analysed, and the results show that, compared with the non-cooperative control method, the proposed method can effectively decrease the total delay and number of stops and increase the outflow rate downstream of the merging bottleneck.