On the Impact of Cooperative Autonomous Vehicles in Improving Freeway Merging: A Modified Intelligent Driver Model-Based Approach

Transport researchers and practitioners have long been seeking capable solutions to deal with the traffic oscillations caused by freeway merging. Although existing approaches based on ramp metering have improved the overall efficiency of on-ramps, their performance is still far below the theoretical capacity. The recently proposed detecting technology of autonomous vehicles (AVs) provides an alternative for maximizing the merging efficiency by developing and using appropriate controllers for AVs. In this paper, we develop a cooperative intelligent driver model in order to examine the system performance under different proportions of AVs. The results show that, with a proper vehicle-to-vehicle controlling mechanism, an increasing percentage of AVs will reduce the total travel time and smooth traffic oscillations.