Impact of Autonomous Vehicles on Capacity of a Two-Lane Highway

An autonomous vehicle (AV) or driverless car ensures safety using advanced sensor and positioning technologies with little or no human input. With numerous emerging technologies, it is important to know the potential capacity effects of AVs to aid our decision-making process with future investments. As AVs are not widely used especially in developing countries like India, it is difficult to study the behaviour of AVs and their interactions with other vehicles in the field. Hence, the mid-block section of a two-lane highway incorporating AVs is simulated using VISSM in this study to analyse how AVs impact the capacity of the highway. Passenger cars are replaced by autonomous cars in the model and the model is calibrated using travel time as measure, and the change in the capacity for various penetration rates of AV is estimated. The study gave promising outputs in terms of capacity enhancement and found that the introduction of the AVs can enable better utilization of the available road space.