Connected and automated vehicle based dynamic throttling strategy for bottleneck problem under mixed traffic environment

To improve traffic efficiency in the road bottleneck, this study proposes a dynamic throttling strategy inspired by the operating principle of the throttling valve. In particular, according to the traffic capacity of the bottleneck region, and real-time traffic volume from the upstream region, this strategy can reasonably restrain the traffic stream entering downstream road by controlling a group of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). More precisely, let the longitudinal gaps among CAVs on adjacent lanes be the adjustable passable gaps (i.e. throttling valve) for others vehicles. In addition, to guarantee the asymptotic stability and safety of the controlled CAVs group, two platoon-like control protocols are developed, respectively. Furthermore, the asymptotic stability conditions for the switched system of state errors, which is formed by the stochastically switching between the two control protocols, are given. Finally, the Vissim-based experiments investigate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic throttling strategy and platoon-like control protocols.