Navigating the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Mixed Traffic Efficiency: A Driving Behavior Perspective

With the proliferation of cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X), connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) are gradually being commercialized. CAVs can interact with road infrastructure and human-driven vehicles (HDVs) to acquire relevant traffic information, thereby altering the characteristics of the traditional traffic flow. The emergence of CAVs is widely believed to bestow benefits to the traffic system in terms of safety, efficiency, and energy consumption. Nevertheless, as with most phenomena, there are two sides to the coin. Further exploration is necessary to determine whether the emergence of CAVs will trigger adverse effects and the underlying factors that may induce adverse effects. To be specific, this article first delves into how selfish driving behaviors (egoism CAV control strategy) can have an unfavorable impact on the performance of the traffic systems, thereby lowering the traffic efficiency. Subsequently, we develop an unselfish (altruism) CAV control strategy that aims to achieve the global optimization and improve the overall road operational capacity. Based on the simulation results obtained at different inflow and outflow rates on highway, it is evident that egoism driving behavior leads to a 11.55% decrease in average speed performance as compared to the noncontrol strategy, while altruism driving behavior results in a 20.14% improvement. Furthermore, we compare the proposed strategy with the current road infrastructure control, which only improves the average speed performance by 11.6%. This indicates that controlling CAVs has the potential to replace the deployment of the traditional road infrastructure, thereby optimizing the social and economic benefits. This article can provide insightful guidance for the future policy formulation in the transportation authorities, wherein the emergence of CAVs needs to be effectively regulated based on the altruism, thus fostering the establishment and development of a safe and efficient mixed traffic ecosystem.