Unleashing the Power of Connected and Automated Vehicles: A Dedicated Link Strategy for Efficient Management of Mixed Traffic

The proper management of mixed traffic is crucial for unleashing the benefits of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). Generally, the benefits of CAVs can be categorized into one-dimensional benefits in car-following performance and two-dimensional benefits in efficiently addressing right-of-way conflicts. Currently, the most effective approach to achieve this is by establishing a dedicated right-of-way for CAVs. However, existing strategies are limited to dedicated lane strategy, which can only unleash the one-dimensional benefits of CAVs while the two-dimensional benefits remain untapped. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel management approach for mixed traffic called the dedicated link strategy. The dedicated link refers to the road link that only allows CAVs to use. This strategy can unleash both the one-dimensional and two-dimensional benefits of CAVs via: (i) dedicated link deployment at the road network level and (ii) a novel intersection management approach. Specifically, at the macroscopic road network level, we introduce a bi-level dedicated link deployment model and design an artificial bee colony based algorithm to solve the optimal dedicated link deployment. At the microscopic intersection level, we develop a novel intersection management approach that integrates traditional traffic signal strategy with the emerging signal-free cooperative driving method, thereby boosting the efficiency of intersections. The macroscopic and microscopic methods will complement each other to achieve efficient management of network-wide mixed traffic systems. Finally, we verify the performance of the dedicated link strategy through comprehensive experiments. In essence, the proposed dedicated link strategy unifies the existing dedicated lane strategy and dedicated intersection strategy, providing a general solution for mixed traffic management.