A cooperative on-ramp merging strategy based on the hybrid of centralized and distributed interaction for heterogeneous vehicles.

The on-ramp merging on the freeway which causes reduced traffic efficiency, increased risks of collision, and more fuel consumption is one of the research hotspots. The mixed traffic made up of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and connected and human-driving vehicles (CHVs) is the trend of the future intelligent traffic. Therefore, to facilitate the on-ramp merging on the freeway in mixed traffic, this paper proposes a hybrid cooperative strategy to the heterogeneous vehicles in a merging zone. As a cyber-physical system, the on-ramp merging on the freeway in mixed traffic was divided into four types and analyzed. In this study, we proposed a synergetic merging framework based on the vehicle-infrastructure cooperative theory for the on-ramp merging to ensure successful merging of mixed traffic. For different types of vehicles in mixed traffic, we designed different control methods, respectively. For CHVs and CAVs, centralized induced control method (CICM) and distributed autonomous control method (DACM) were designed. When designing these two methods, we separately considered two classic and important human factors: the reaction time of drivers of CHVs and the comfort of CAVs' passengers. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed strategy and methods was validated through simulations. The proposed hybrid cooperative strategy can derive an optimal trajectory for each vehicle. The control method of CAVs can obtain the optimal trajectory while satisfy the comfort requirements of passengers. By analyzing results of simulations, it can be known that the reaction time of drivers has a certain effect on the state of the CHVs' merging process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]