Simulation Analysis of Heterogeneous Traffic Flow in the Expressway Merging Area

With the rapid development of V2V and autonomous driving technology, the heterogeneous traffic flow of human-driven vehicles (HDVs) and connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) has become the future trend. The merging area is the traffic bottleneck and accident-prone area of the expressway. Due to the lack of actual measurement conditions, the operation characteristics of heterogeneous traffic flow in the merging area still need to be discovered. In this context, based on microscopic simulation software, this paper designs the simulation experiment for the scene of the expressway merging area, carries out the simulation experiment for the heterogeneous traffic flow, and finally evaluates the simulation results from safety and efficiency. The results show that with the increase of CAV penetration rate, the safety of heterogeneous traffic flow in expressway merging areas is significantly improved, the traffic flow operation efficiency is improved, and the improvement effect is significant when the penetration rate is greater than 50%. Additionally, the self-adjustment ability of a single driving model type is limited under the disturbance of merging.