ESTIMATING POSSIBLE IMPACT ON TOTAL DELAY OF AUTOMATION SCENARIOS FOR A BOTTLENECK SUB-NETWORK

This paper presents a study on the applicability and potential benefits of the highway automation and platooning concepts in the case of an urban sub-network. The authors focus particularly on the case of a bridge with several entries and exits which constitutes a bottleneck of the urban highway system. Two egress strategies developed for the masive exit phenomena specific to this bridge case are proposed and evaluated. Two automation scenarios are introduced. Both address the mixed, automated and manual, traffic case with dedicated lanes. Two performance measures are considered: the capacity of the automated part of the system and the average total trip time. It is generally believed that exit conditions may significantly impact the performance of automated highways. To investigate this phenomenon in the present case, the two scenarios are analyzed under two different hypotheses: a relatively small capacity for the bridge exit and when twice this capacity is available. The authors also investigate how several factors such as the level of automation of the infrastructure, the level of market penetration of automated vehicles, the traffic volume and the bridge exit capacity impact the total average trip time required to travel through the system. They conclude that constraints imposed by the massive exit phenomena inherent to such bottleneck systems play an extremely important role in determining the performance of the system, sometimes limiting dramatically the benefits of automation.