In recent years, automated vehicles have been developing rapidly, and some automated vehicles have begun to drive on highways. The market share of automated vehicles is expected to increase and will greatly affect traffic flow characteristics. This paper focuses on the mixed traffic flow of manual and automated vehicles. The study improves the existing cellular automaton model to capture the differences between manual vehicles and automated vehicles. Computer simulations are employed to analyze the characteristic variations in the mixed traffic flow under different automated vehicle proportions, lane change probabilities, and reaction times. Several new conclusions are drawn in the paper. First, with the increment of the proportion of automated vehicles, freeway capacity increases; the capacity increment is more significant for single-lane traffic than for two-lane traffic. Second, for single-lane traffic flow, reducing the reaction time of the automated vehicle can significantly improve road traffic capacity—as much as doubling it—and reaction time reduction has no obvious effect on the capacity of the two-lane traffic. Third, with the proportion increment of automated vehicles, lane change frequency reduces significantly. Fourth, when the density is 15 < ρ < 55 vehicles/km, the addition of 20% automated vehicles to a traffic flow that consisted of only manual vehicles can decrease congestion by up to 16.7%.
What happens when drivers of automated vehicles take over control in critical lane change situations?
