Simulating the Effect of Autonomous Vehicles on Roadway Mobility in a Microscopic Traffic Simulator

Continuous developments in automotive technology brought about the reality of having an increasing number of autonomous vehicles (AV) on roadways soon. However, this advancement comes with the uncertainty of how the interaction between the autonomous and non-autonomous (non-AV) vehicles will play out. Using traffic simulators to model both AVs and non-AVs, and studying the effect of AVs on roadway mobility can help researchers in learning what to expect in real life. In this paper, an open-source simulator called Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) was used to develop AVs by modifying Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) car following and LC2013 lane changing models. Then, three actual roadways in Columbus, Ohio were modeled, and 40 simulations were run for each traffic network. The first set of simulations focused on the impacts that AVs have on vehicle roadway mobility with non-AVs when all the AVs have the same autonomy level. The second set of simulations had mixed AV autonomy levels (SAE Level 2, 3 and 4) with mixed AV and non-AV traffic. The analysis revealed that mobility of AVs and non-AVs increased generally as autonomy level increased. When the AV autonomy levels were mixed, the non-AVs experienced lower average speeds and decreased roadway mobility.