In September, 2020, research paper of Xiangdong Chen entitled “Modeling and Control of Automated Vehicle Access on Dedicated Bus Rapid Transit Lanes” was accepted by Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies.  

Highlights:

• An innovative idea of implementing a mixed-use BRT/AV lane by allowing AVs to use dedicated BRT lanes.

• A quantitative evaluation model for the performance on the BRT/AV lane under different traffic inputs.

• An optimal assignment model of AVs on the entire corridor of general-purpose lanes and the mixed-use lane.

• Both numerical experiments and simulation experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Abstract:

The establishment of dedicated automated vehicle (AV) lanes has been regarded as an effective approach for addressing heterogeneous traffic with both AVs and regular vehicles (RVs), promoting both traffic efficiency and safety. However, building new dedicated AV lanes in urban areas is not cost effective in the early stage of AV adoption. Fortunately, dedicated bus rapid transit (BRT) lanes can provide a separate right-of-way (ROW) for AVs, which is a practical and economical alternative for promoting AV development. In this paper, we propose an innovative idea of allowing AVs to use dedicated BRT lanes, and quantitatively analyze the stationary performance of mixed-use lanes. Specifically, the analysis is conducted through a cyclic space–time model for AVs on the mixed-use lane, and a sequential optimization method (SOM) is proposed to approximately solve the model. With the SOM providing a valid tool for performance evaluation, we then develop an assignment model for the routing of AVs on a traffic corridor with both mixed-use lane and general-purpose lanes to minimize the total travel time of both AVs and RVs. The model is formulated as a black-box nonlinear program without an explicit analytical form; a successive linear programming (SLP) algorithm with finite difference for gradient approximation is then utilized to solve the nonlinear program. Numerical experiments are conducted in different scenarios, which reveal that the establishment of the mixed-use lane can not only improve the efficiency of AVs but also alleviate the congestion on general-purpose lanes.