Analysis of Traffic Flow Characteristics in Highway Construction Zones Under a Vehicle-Road Coordination Environment

The increasing demand for highway traffic year by year has led to severe damage to some in-service roads, with road reconstruction and maintenance work increasing day by day. Construction zones have gradually become the main bottleneck affecting traffic flow operations. At present, the transitional leading technology of vehicle-road coordination is gradually being applied, providing a new direction for alleviating highway traffic problems. However, due to the complexity of traffic flow operations in construction sections, the development of highway construction zone traffic in a vehicle-road coordination environment will face many challenges. Taking a one-way three-lane highway construction zone as the research scenario and heterogeneous traffic flow as the research object, a microscopic model of traffic flow in highway construction sections under a vehicle-road coordination environment was constructed. Analyze the traffic flow characteristics of the middle lane closure scenario in construction zones through traffic simulation. The results show that CAV penetration can improve traffic flow efficiency. Homogeneous CAV flow increases the road capacity of non-construction sections by 58.04% and construction sections by 31.76–33.83%. Large vehicles have a certain negative impact on traffic flow, especially significant under congested flow conditions. The middle lane occupancy in the construction zone has a significant impact.