The technology of autonomous vehicles is expected to revolutionize the operation of road transport systems. The penetration rate of autonomous vehicles will be low at the early stage of their deployment. It is a challenge to explore the effects of autonomous vehicles and their penetration on heterogeneous traffic flow dynamics. This paper aims to investigate this issue. An improved cellular automaton was employed as the modeling platform for our study. In particular, two sets of rules for lane changing were designed to address mild and aggressive lane changing behavior. With extensive simulation studies, we obtained some promising results. First, the introduction of autonomous vehicles to road traffic could considerably improve traffic flow, particularly the road capacity and free-flow speed. And the level of improvement increases with the penetration rate. Second, the lane-changing frequency between neighboring lanes evolves with traffic density along a fundamental-diagram-like curve. Third, the impacts of autonomous vehicles on the collective traffic flow characteristics are mainly related to their smart maneuvers in lane changing and car following, and it seems that the car-following impact is more pronounced.
Recent advances in intelligent transportation system allow traffic safety studies to extend from historic data-based analyses to real-time applications. The study presents a new method to predict crash likelihood with traffic data collected by discrete loop detectors as well as the web-crawl weather data. Matched case-control method and support vector machines (SVMs) technique were employed to identify the risk status. The adaptive synthetic over-sampling technique was applied to solve the imbalanced dataset issues. Random forest technique was applied to select the contributing factors and avoid the over-fitting issues. The results indicate that the SVMs classifier could successfully classify 76.32% of the crashes on the test dataset and 87.52% of the crashes on the overall dataset, which were relatively satisfactory compared with the results of the previous studies. Compared with the SVMs classifier without the data, the SVMs classifier with the web-crawl weather data increased the crash prediction accuracy by 1.32% and decreased the false alarm rate by 1.72%, showing the potential the potential value of the massive web weather data. Mean impact value method was employed to evaluate the variable effects, and the results are identical with the results of most of previous studies. The emerging technique based on the discrete traffic data and web weather data proves to be more applicable on realtime safety management on freeways.
This paper studies a control strategy that is applicable to local ramp metering in the presence of random-location bottlenecks (RLB) downstream of any metered on-ramp. With the support of Vicroads (Highway Department of Victoria State, Australia), local ramp metering in the RLB case has recently been investigated, aiming to design appropriate and practicable ramp metering approaches. A related control strategy has been developed and tested in macroscopic simulation, and this paper presents some representative testing results. This strategy has been incorporated into the coordinated freeway ramp signal control system HERO and will be applied in Melbourne in the frame of a large-scale freeway upgrade project.
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