Investigation Of Autonomous Vehicles’ Influence On The Traffic Flow Based On A Cellular Automata Simulation Approach

Autonomous vehicles are envisioned to be the next generation revolutionizing technology that will change the perception of transportation in all phases.AVs provide a secure mode of travel by eliminating human driving errors.By realizing shorter headway and response time,the road capacity can be significantly improved,making travel more efficient and comfortable.This study provides a solid investigation on the impact of autonomous vehicles on traffic flow characteristics and also recommendations for future discussion.The methodology adopted in this study includes updated Cellular Automata Model and lane changing rules(Aggressive lane change and Polite lane change)of vehicles.The main research contents and results are as follows:The influence of different penetration rates of different modes of vehicles on traffic flow characteristics.A modified Cellular Automata(CA)model has been developed in order to analyze the effect of heterogeneous vehicles.Autonomous bus(AB)is involved to investigate its impact as it has the potential to change the existing transportation systems.If AB is employed concurrently with autonomous car(AC),there will be a significant improvement in traffic flow and road capacity,as equally more passengers can be accommodated in AB and AC is also anticipated in carpooling.The influence of Autonomous Micro Cars(two seated)on traffic flow.In the proposed CA model,Autonomous Micro Car is investigated on the overall capacity of the network.The results reveal that micro cars(manual and autonomous)have the potential to reduce traffic congestion and to increase the road’s capacity or flow rate(vehicles/hour).When the average occupancy of the vehicle is less than 2,when Autonomous Micro Cars are deployed alongside AC,the flow rate can be considerably increased.The findings illustrate the importance of Autonomous Micro Cars on traffic flow,occupancy of passengers and efficiency of highways.The influence of different driving behaviors conducted by drivers of different ages and genders.In the near future,autonomous vehicles will be running alongside manual vehicles where each driver has unique attributes.Under these conditions,previous studies focusing on the effects of AV are scarce.This section proposed the new model of CA to tackle this problem,in which different autonomous vehicles(cars and buses)and manual vehicles(cars and buses)are compared in terms of simple traffic parameters.The manual cars are further divided into subcategories based on age groups and gender.That category has separate attributes of its own that distinguish it from each other.The result is represented in the form of traffic flow fundamentals,i.e.,flow rate,speed and density.Also,lane change behavior under the circumstances of mixed autonomous vehicles and manual vehicles is also investigated.The outcome of the simulation promises that autonomous vehicles would increase the efficiency of the road.When the vehicles change the lanes aggressively,there is a substantial growth in flow rate and capacity of the network.Polite lane change does not significantly affect the flow rate.