The impact of autonomous vehicles on urban traffic network capacity: an experimental analysis by microscopic traffic simulation

Abstract

Urban commuters have been suffering from traffic congestion for a long time. In order to avoid or mitigate the congestion effect, it is significant to know how the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) influence the road capacity. The effects that AVs bring to the macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) were investigated through microscopic traffic simulations. This is a key issue as the MFD is a basic model to describe road capacity in practical traffic engineering. Accordingly, the paper investigates how the different percentage of AVs affects the urban MFD. A detailed simulation study was carried out by using SUMO both with an artificial grid road network and a real-world network in Budapest. On the one hand, simulations clearly show the capacity improvement along with AVs penetration growth. On the other hand, the paper introduces an efficient modeling for MFDs with different AVs rates by using the generalized additive model (GAM).