A on-ramp cooperative merging strategy based on the active participation of downstream vehicles

At present, most of the on-ramp merging control strategies that control upstream vehicles to coordinate the merger have an adverse effect on the traffic status after the merging position (MP). To address the problem, this paper proposes a new on-ramp cooperative merging control strategy for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) by controlling downstream collaborative vehicles. The downstream vehicles of the MP are used as assistant vehicles to cooperate with the on-ramp merging vehicle. The on-ramp cooperative merging problem is transformed into an optimization problem with states and input constraints and solved by model predictive control (MPC). The regional traffic status index is defined, and the time and fuel consumption required for the merger are considered. Finally, the strategy proposed in this paper is verified through simulation experiments, and compared with the traditional strategy. The simulation results show that the proposed strategy can effectively prevent the traffic state from deteriorating due to the merging behavior, and has certain advantages in improving the efficiency of merging and reducing fuel consumption.