Mixed Vehicle Group Merging Control in the Vicinity of Traffic Signals: A Cyber-Physical Perspective

The reasonable and orderly traffic in vicinity of traffic signals is essential for the traffic efficiency of any signalized intersection. Under mixed traffic condition, adverse traffic impact of unreasonable vehicle merging behavior will be expected to be suppressed by designing active cyber-physical interaction mechanism in this section. From cyber-physical system (CPS) perspective, this paper proposes a vehicle group based merging control method for connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs). A vehicle group merging control protocol considering the physical driving disturbances is designed. Two kinds of stability proofs are given, which are asymptotic stability of the system with respect to vehicle internal disturbance and string stability of the system with respect to vehicle external disturbance. Simulation results show that through vehicle group merging control in vicinity of traffic signals, the proposed method can increase the traffic flow, average speed, and reduce traffic congestion in the vicinity of traffic signals.