On-Ramp Merging Strategy with Two-Stage Optimization Based on Fully Proactive and Cooperative Merging of Vehicles
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 149, Issue 4
Abstract
The on-ramp area has been a hot spot for research as a bottleneck area. In this paper, an on-ramp cooperative merging control strategy is proposed to make full use of active cooperative vehicles, and alleviate the negative influence of merging on the main road. First, a two-stage framework is proposed to illustrate the merging strategy. At the vehicle level, the cooperative merging controllers of vehicles are designed based on an optimization algorithm that considers the penalty function. At the traffic level, the cooperative distance of the upstream and downstream vehicles at the main road target merging position are optimized to improve merging efficiency. Meanwhile, to ensure the implementation of the proposed strategy in mixed traffic, we propose a method to determine the lead vehicles based on the proximity principle. Numerical experiments were performed to verify the fully proactive and cooperative merging (FPCM) strategy, the effectiveness of the vehicle cooperative controllers, the necessity of optimizing the cooperative distance, the effect of different velocities on the main road and ramp, and the effectiveness of determining the lead vehicles. In the case of multivehicle merging, the proposed strategy can improve merging efficiency by 44.42% and save fuel consumption by 39.11%. In the case of a single merging vehicle, the optimized proposed strategy can improve merging efficiency by 48.4% and save fuel consumption by 31.4%. Finally, the simulation experiments for the different maximum speeds of vehicles show that a sufficient speed adjustment range can improve the advantages of the strategy.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This study was funded by National 135 Key R&D Program Projects under Grant 2018YFB1600600, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61803052, the State Education Ministry, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 2019 CDJSK 04 XK23.
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Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 149 • Issue 4 • April 2023
Copyright
© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 9, 2021
Accepted: Nov 4, 2022
Published online: Jan 19, 2023
Published in print: Apr 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Jun 19, 2023
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