Intermittent and Dynamic Priority Control of Dedicated Lanes for Connected and Automated Vehicles on Freeways

Dedicated lanes for connected automated vehicles (CAVs) have been proposed on freeways to improve traffic operation in mixed traffic environments with CAVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs). The conventional static control of CAV dedicated lanes provides exclusive right-of-way for CAVs and cannot fully utilize the CAV dedicated lane with the time-varying demands of CAV and HV traffic. This study proposes intermittent and dynamic priority control approaches for CAV dedicated lanes with the aid of lane control signals and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. A CAV dedicated lane is divided into segments and the accessibility to each segment is dynamically assigned to connected and non-connected HVs for better utilization of the CAV dedicated lane on condition that the priority of CAVs in the dedicated lane is guaranteed. The states of CAVs and HVs are considered as well as the impacts of HV clearance in the dedicated lane on the traffic in the adjacent regular lane. Numerical studies validate the significant benefits of the proposed control in which the average delays of HVs are greatly reduced and the average delays of CAVs are comparable to the static control approach.