Cooperative Platooning with Mixed Traffic on Urban Arterial Roads

In this paper, we showcase a framework for cooperative mixed traffic platooning that allows the platooning vehicles to realize multiple benefits from using vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications and advanced controls on urban arterial roads. A mixed traffic platoon, in general, can be formulated by a lead and ego connected automated vehicles (CAVs) with one or more unconnected human-driven vehicles (UHVs) in between. As this platoon approaches an intersection, the lead vehicle uses signal phase and timing (SPaT) messages from the connected intersection to optimize its trajectory for travel time and energy efficiency as it passes through the intersection. These benefits carry over to the UHVs and the ego vehicle as they follow the lead vehicle. The ego vehicle then uses information from the lead vehicle received through basic safety messages (BSMs) to further optimize its safety, driving comfort, and energy consumption. This is accomplished by the recently designed cooperative adaptive cruise control with unconnected vehicles (CACCu). The performance benefits of our framework are proven and demonstrated by simulations using real-world platooning data from the CACC Field Operation Test (FOT) Dataset from the Netherlands.