Analytical approximation for macroscopic fundamental diagram of urban corridor with mixed human and connected and autonomous traffic

Abstract

Advances in connected and autonomous vehicles have the promise to reshape the future of the transportation system. How and when the benefits associated with automation and connectivity technology will start to impact the performance of an urban corridor is an issue of interest for traffic operators. This paper proposes an analytical capacity model for urban corridors with mixed traffic based on the concept of macroscopic fundamental diagram. The model incorporates the full spectrum of connected and autonomous vehicle penetration rates as well as the reaction times of different vehicle following patterns. The connected and autonomous vehicle platoon intensity, formulated as an exponential function of the connected and autonomous vehicle penetration rate, is also considered in the proposed analytical capacity model. Numerical experiments are conducted to verify that different reaction time settings yield disparate results. Some reaction time settings were found to cause the corridor capacity to increase monotonically with the connected and autonomous vehicle penetration rate while others led to decreases in corridor capacity with connected and autonomous vehicle penetration rates. Finally, the validity of the proposed methodology is verified via simulation tests in VISSIM 2020.