Modeling System Dynamics of Mixed Traffic with Partially Connected and Automated Vehicles

This research proposed a system dynamics model of mixed flow consisting of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) and Human-driven Vehicles (HVs). It quantifies the impact of CAVs’ speed change on traffic state. The model describes the impedance of CAVs’ speed reduction on traffic flow and considers the impact of potential additional lane change induced by the speed reduction. A VISSIM based microscopic simulation evaluation is performed. The results confirm that the accuracy of the proposed model is over 80%. Sensitivity analysis was conducted in terms of CAV penetration rate and v/c ratio. The proposed model demonstrated a consistent performance across all CAV penetration rate as long as v/c ratio is above 0.14. The proposed model could serve as the foundation of CAV based traffic management applications, such as variable speed limit and speed harmonization.