Modeling and stability analysis of mixed traffic with conventional and connected automated vehicles from cyber physical perspective

With the development of automated driving and communication technologies, the connected automated vehicles (CAVs) gradually enter market and become more popular. At the same time, the mixed traffic composed of conventional vehicles and CAVs will gradually become a very common form of traffic. In fact, the driving process of CAV is a typical cyber physical process which couples tightly the cyber factor of traffic information with the physical components of the vehicles. In this paper, we present a mixed traffic model from the perspective of cyber physical fusion, the model focuses on the fact that the CAVs can obtain the information from multiple vehicles ahead and the drivers have a reaction delay in driving process. The stability condition of the proposed model is derived via linear stability analysis. Furthermore, we investigate the fuel consumption and CO2 emission using the model we propose under different penetration rates of CAVs. The results show that the stability of mixed traffic is related to driver’s reaction delay, the penetration rate of CAVs, and the information from multiple vehicles ahead that CAVs can obtain. Numerical simulations are conducted to verify the analytical results. The simulation results demonstrate that the model proposed in this paper can better reflect the real advantages of CAV in mixed traffic, and further show that the model in this paper is more realistic. More specifically, the information obtained from multiple vehicles ahead including conventional vehicle and CAV can improve the stability of mixed traffic and traffic efficiency to a greater extent, and the driver’s reaction delay will destabilize mixed traffic. Besides, when the penetration rate of CAVs is high, the fuel consumption and CO2 emission in mixed traffic can be greatly reduced.