Dampen the Stop-and-Go Traffic with Connected and Automated Vehicles – A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Stop-and-go traffic poses significant challenges to the efficiency and safety of traffic operations, and its impacts and working mechanism have attracted much attention. Recent studies have shown that Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) with carefully designed longitudinal control have the potential to dampen the stop-and-go wave based on simulated vehicle trajectories. In this study, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is adopted to control the longitudinal behavior of CAVs and real-world vehicle trajectory data is utilized to train the DRL controller. It considers a Human-Driven (HD) vehicle tailed by a CAV, which are then followed by a platoon of HD vehicles. Such an experimental design is to test how the CAV can help to dampen the stop-and-go wave generated by the lead HD vehicle and contribute to smoothing the following HD vehicles’ speed profiles. The DRL control is trained using real-world vehicle trajectories, and eventually evaluated using SUMO simulation. The results show that the DRL control decreases the speed oscillation of the CAV by 54% and 8%-28% for those following HD vehicles. Significant fuel consumption savings are also observed. Additionally, the results suggest that CAVs may act as a traffic stabilizer if they choose to behave slightly altruistically.