Design and performance evaluation of mixed manual and automated control traffic

We present a technology which allows manually controlled and automatically controlled vehicles to co-exist, thereby reducing much of the cost and infrastructure requirements in highway automation. An autonomous vehicle driving system (AVDS) is presented which only uses information from vehicle sensors, thereby eliminating the requirement that vehicles communicate with one another. This format allows gradual market penetration of AVDS, which makes the technology attractive from a systems implementation standpoint. To evaluate the performance of the mixed traffic, we simulate manual and automated vehicles together and show that our AVDS can lead to potentially large gains in capacity and smoother flow without the loss of safety.