Cooperative driving strategies of connected vehicles for stabilizing traffic flow

It is foreseeable that connected vehicles (CVs) and regular vehicles (RVs) will be operated together on roads in the upcoming decades. The appearance of CVs provides us an opportunity to improve traffic efficiency by guiding drivers to properly steer their CVs. To take advantage of this opportunity, this paper proposes two cooperative driving strategies for CVs that move in heterogeneous RV and CV traffic, namely, CDS-L and CDS-G. CDS-L is a local strategy that considers only the traffic surrounding the subject CVs. CDS-G is a global strategy that considers the conditions of all CVs on a road. The basis of the strategies is to incorporate the spatial and temporal averages of the driving status of surrounding CVs. A parameter that is a function of the traffic density is introduced to balance traffic efficiency and fluctuations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategies well suppress traffic fluctuations and thus promote traffic efficiency. The proposed strategies are dedicated to traffic congestion mitigation by using low-level configuration CVs.