Study on Connected Control Strategy of Urban Expressway Merging Areas

In the merging area of urban expressways, accidents are more likely due to the high frequency of vehicles changing lanes and merging. Advanced connected and automated vehicles technology provides the capacity of communication between vehicles and infrastructure and ways to potentially reduce accident rates. This paper proposes a merging assistant strategy to reduce lane changing behavior and improve the safety and traffic efficiency in merging areas under a connected vehicle environment. Vehicles in the outer lane are guided to perform more reasonable lane changing behavior by sensing vehicle information on the main road and the ramp, reducing lane changing among the main road vehicles. The simulation platform of the connected vehicles strategy is established by using the VISSIM, Visual Basic, and MATLAB. The results show that this strategy can reduce the delay of the overall traffic flow effectively in the merging area and improve the traffic efficiency.