Cooperative Merging Strategy for Connected Vehicles at Highway On-Ramps
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 145, Issue 6
Abstract
As traffic demands increase rapidly on highways, effective merging strategies are necessary to cooperate with intelligent vehicles and improve traffic operations. Existing merging algorithms for connected vehicles rarely consider the inflow from on-ramps. Also, the merging order of vehicles is generally generated based on very simple rules. In this paper, a cooperative merging strategy is developed for vehicles wirelessly connected to other vehicles and roadside infrastructure. The cooperative merging is formulated as an optimization problem, which takes as objectives the minimization of travel time of mainline vehicles and maximization of the number of merging vehicles. This problem is solved by a genetic algorithm. The effectiveness of this strategy is verified in MATLAB with various simulation scenarios. By comparing the simulation results with a platoon-velocity-based merging strategy, the cooperative merging scheme proves to improve traffic performance in terms of traffic efficiency and fuel consumption. Significant improvements are obtained, especially when mainline and on-ramp demand are both particularly high. To conclude, the proposed strategy is applicable to cooperative merging operations under saturated traffic conditions.
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Acknowledgments
This study is partially supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2242018K30015), the Ordinary University Graduate Student Scientific Research Innovation Project of Jiangsu Province (KYCX17_0145 and KYCX17_0141), and the National Key R&D Program in China (2016YFB0100906).
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Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 145 • Issue 6 • June 2019
Copyright
©2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 6, 2018
Accepted: Nov 13, 2018
Published online: Mar 26, 2019
Published in print: Jun 1, 2019
Discussion open until: Aug 26, 2019
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