A Method to Calculate the Capacity of Unsignalized Intersection for Connected and Automated Vehicles Based on Gap Acceptance Theory

With the help of advanced communication technologies such as V2V and V2I, a group of connected and automated vehicles (CAV’s) can drive cooperatively in a platoon form, which has been verified to improve traffic capacity significantly. The rapid growth of the market penetration of CAV’s highlights the need for a deep understanding of the capacity issues of the mixed traffic flow for the better deployment of CAV’s in the near future. To this end, a calculation method of the capacity at unsignalized intersections with mixed traffic flow is proposed in this paper based on the gap acceptance theory. This model can be extended to establish a new traffic capacity model of unsignalized intersections under a completely intelligent CAV environment. In addition, numerical simulations in various scenarios are performed to show how the CAV market penetration rates affect the capacity at unsignalized intersections, which indicates that the numerical results of our proposed model are in good agreement with those of theoretical analysis.