Cooperative lane-change method of mixed traffic flow of CAVs and HVs on accident section of highway

In modern transportation system, traffic accidents on highway will affect both road capacity and road safety. Connected-automated-vehicle (CAV) technology bring promising solution to improve the traffic efficiency and reduce risks after the accident happening. Based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) architecture, this paper proposes a novel CAV technology based on a cooperative lane-change method that can be used for advanced traffic management to enhance the transport service. In the proposed approach, road-side units (RSUs) are set along the accident-prone section of a highway to detect accidents and vehicles and communicate with CAVs. CAVs receive the data from RSUs and other CAVs. The on-board units (OBUs) analyze the data and come to a solution based on the positions and motion parameters. It executes the lane-change process differently according to the motion state of the vehicle. In order to assess the proposed method, a simulation test-bed is developed using SUMO, and a typical highway is employed as the study case. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed method can reduce about 90% of time loss and increase 20% of average speed in a two-lane highway. And it can reduce the standard deviation of time loss, which means it improves the fairness of the transportation system after the accident. Moreover, sensitivity analysis shows that the coordination effect improves as the market penetration of CAV rises.