Modelling and Simulation of Heterogeneous Traffic: An investigation of autonomous vehicles impact on heterogeneous traffic in terms of traffic flow and safety
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Automotive engineering (MPAUT), MSc
Publicerad
2020
Författare
Pettersson, Nicklas
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
The development of Autonomous vehicles has intensified during recent years, and
autonomous vehicles is believed to be a common sight on public roads in the near
future. It is safe to say that autonomous vehicles will revolutionize the transportation
field in multiple ways, such as improved transportation comfort and improved
traffic safety. The aim of this study is to investigate how autonomous vehicles will
impact heterogeneous traffic in terms of traffic flow and safety. In the context of
this study, heterogeneous traffic is defined as traffic situations with different vehicle
types, both manually driven and autonomous.
To investigate how autonomous vehicles impacts the flow and safety of heterogeneous
traffic, simulation models of manually driven vehicles and autonomous vehicles was
calibrated. The simulation models, which were calibrated based on a naturalistic
data-set, represent cars and trucks which takes the preceding vehicle type under
consideration. Simulations were executed in SUMO with various penetration rates
of autonomous vehicles with the intention to analyze how the different penetration
rates impact the heterogeneous traffic.
The simulation results showed that the number of traffic conflicts tends to decrease
as the penetration rate of autonomous vehicles increase for the same mean road
speed. Also, the results showed that the mean road speed increase as the penetration
rate of autonomous vehicles increase for the same vehicle flow rate. The
difference in mean road speed for the different penetration rates increases as the
vehicle flow rate gets bigger. This leads to the number of conflicts increase as the
penetration rate increase when the vehicle flow rates are high.
These results suggest the autonomous vehicles have the potential to improve the
traffic safety by decreasing the number of conflicts and to improve the traffic flow
by increasing the mean road speed and therefore lessen the travel time. However,
the mean speed needs to be limited, or else the number of conflicts will significantly
increase.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
SUMO , Autonomous vehicle , Heterogenous traffic , Traffic flow , Traffic safety , car-following , lane-changes , Traffic simulation , HighD dataset , Model calibration