Moving characteristics analysis of mixed traffic flow of CAVs and HVs around accident zones

With the emergence of V2V/V2I technologies, it is expectable that the market penetration rate of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) will gradually increase. Deeply analyzing the evolutionary mechanism of the mixed flow of CAVs and HVs is foundational for future studies. Therefore, a modified cellular automata (CA) model around accident zones based on the Kerner–Klenov–Wolf (KKW) model is proposed to describe the moving characteristics of mixed traffic flow. The proposed CA model considers variable acceleration and passage utility, which can simulate lane-changing behaviors in multi-lane scenarios more realistically than traditional symmetric two-lane cellular automata (STCA). The evolution of traffic congestion around the accident zone in mixed-flow environments is simulated with different penetration rates of vehicles with cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) devices. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to test the effects of different parameters. The results show that the low-speed synchronized moving mixed flow can be reproduced by the proposed method, and the impact of accidents can be efficiently alleviated with the increase of CAVs.