A scheduling scheme for autonomous vehicle highway merging with an outflow traffic and fairness analysis

Recently, vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication-based scheduling schemes for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) on highway on-ramps have received attention because the schemes assign optimal merging times to CAVs based on their criteria, such as first-in first-out order or minimizing CAV total travel time. However, these schemes cause traffic congestion due to the criteria when the vehicle inflow traffic becomes high. To mitigate traffic congestion, a scheduling scheme should assign merging times to CAVs to decrease road vehicle density. In this paper, we propose a scheduling scheme for autonomous vehicle highway merging with an outflow traffic and fairness analysis. We formulate a multiobjective function that achieves both outflow traffic maximization and fairness in assigned merging times. Since more vehicles pass a highway on-ramp as highway on-ramp outflow traffic increases, the proposed scheme decreases vehicle density on roads by maximizing the outflow traffic. Furthermore, the proposed scheme distributes the vehicle density on both the main and ramp roads by fairly assigning their merging times. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme mitigates the potential traffic congestion of previous scheduling schemes. Furthermore, the proposed scheme improves outflow traffic from highway on-ramps by more than 200 veh/h compared with the previous scheduling schemes.