Traffic Impact Analysis of Typical Sections of Freeway under Multiple Penetrations of Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles will bring new changes to the road traffic flow. The driving behavior of autonomous vehicles can be set as conservative or aggressive. Therefore, different penetration levels of such autonomous vehicles in traffic can lead to different effects in road traffic flow, which is also directly related to the traffic management and control strategy. Taking typical sections of freeway as research objects, this paper is devoted to quantifying the traffic impact under multiple penetrations of autonomous vehicles. VISSIM simulation models of different sections of freeway are built for different traffic status scenarios and various levels of autonomous vehicle penetration. The analysis indicates that penetration of autonomous vehicles has a slight positive impact on traffic operations for all segments in the free flow scenario. In the saturation flow scenario, parabolic relationship between penetrations of autonomous vehicles and average travel time can be observed. Moreover, in the saturation flow and wide moving jam scenarios, with the increase of penetration of autonomous vehicles, the average travel time decreases in merging segment and waving segment.