A Scheduling Scheme for Cooperative Merging at a Highway On-Ramp with Maximizing Average Speed of Automated Vehicles

Recently, connected and automated vehicles have potential to mitigate traffic congestion and improve traffic efficiency at a highway on-ramp. Especially, vehicle to infrastructure communication based scheduling schemes are paid attention because a central control server can assign merging timing to automated vehicles to improve traffic efficiency on whole roads. Although several schemes calculate merging timing based on their criteria, these schemes cause traffic congestion when inflow traffic becomes high. In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to schedule merging timing of vehicles such that density of vehicles decreases on whole roads. In this paper, we propose a scheduling scheme for cooperative merging at a highway on-ramp with maximizing average speed of automated vehicles. The main idea of the proposed scheme is to utilize the traffic model that density and speed of vehicles have a negative correlation. By utilizing the traffic model, the proposed scheme preferentially assigns merging timing to vehicles which are on a congested road by maximizing average speed of all vehicles on whole roads. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme decreases density of vehicles on whole roads even if inflow traffic becomes high. Furthermore, the proposed scheme improves outflow traffic from a highway on-ramp by 400 (veh/h) at most in comparison with related schemes.