Ecological Driving for Connected and Automated Vehicles at Unsaturated Intersections Considering Queue Effects

In this paper, an ecological driving (eco-driving) algorithm considering queue effects is proposed for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) at unsaturated intersections in order to reduce fuel consumption and travel time. Firstly, after the traffic flow parameters are obtained using vehicle-to-infrastructure communication technology, the kinematic shockwave model is used to predict the vehicle queue length at the saturated intersections. Secondly, to decrease fuel consumption, a fuel-saving optimization problem is formulated using the estimated queue length, and for real-time control, the formulated optimization problem is decomposed into two subproblems depending on whether the CAV will stop to queue. Then, to reduce fuel consumption and travel time simultaneously, the eco-driving algorithm is designed, where the trajectory re-optimization process is implemented in order not to block the upstream vehicles. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out on VISSIM to demonstrate the control performance of the proposed eco-driving algorithm on CAVs and on the entire traffic flow. Simulation results show that the proposed eco-driving algorithm can significantly decrease the fuel consumption and travel time of both CAVs and the traffic flow, and higher market penetration rate of CAVs can result in better control performance.