Multi-vehicle Cooperative Merging Control Strategy for Expressway under New Mixed Traffic Environment

With the in-depth application of cooperative vehicle infrastructure system (CVIS) and automatic driving technology, a new traffic situation of hybrid driving of human driving vehicles (HDVs) and connected and automated Vehicles (CAVs) will certainly appear on the road in the future. Facing the problem of multi-vehicles confluence in the merging area of the expressway under the new mixed traffic environment, a cooperative merging control strategy is proposed to optimize the driving trajectories for the CAVs and reduce the traffic congestion in the merging area. First, on the basis of setting a dedicated CAVs lane on the mainline, different merging scenes are divided according to the traffic situations that the CAVs may encounter. Then, the vehicle cooperative merging model in the merging area is constructed to control the speed of CAVs. Finally, the model is analyzed and verified by simulation experiments. The simulation results show that the multi-vehicle cooperative merging control strategy proposed in this paper can make the speed distribution of the vehicles more uniform in the process of driving, and effectively improve passenger comfort and traffic efficiency in the merging area. At the same time, when the CAVs permeability is 50%, the total travel time in the system is also increased by about 8.09%.