English

Information Flow Topology in Mixed Traffic: A Comparative Study between "Looking Ahead" and "Looking Behind"

Systems and Control 2023-09-06 v1 Systems and Control

Abstract

The emergence of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) promises smoother traffic flow. In mixed traffic where human-driven vehicles (HDVs) also exist, existing research mostly focuses on "looking ahead" (i.e., the CAVs receive information from preceding vehicles) strategies for CAVs, while recent work reveals that "looking behind" (i.e., the CAVs receive information from their rear vehicles) strategies might provide more possibilities for CAV longitudinal control. This paper presents a comparative study between these two types of information flow topology (IFT) from the string stability perspective, with the role of maximum platoon size (MPS) also under investigation. Precisely, we provide a dynamical modeling framework for the mixed platoon under the multi-predecessor-following (MPF) topology and the multi-successor-leading (MSL) topology. Then, a unified method for string stability analysis is presented, with explicit consideration of both IFT and MPS. Numerical results suggest that MSL ("looking behind") outperforms MPF ("looking ahead" ) in mitigating traffic perturbations. In addition, increasing MPS could further improve string stability of mixed traffic flow.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.01625,
  title  = {Information Flow Topology in Mixed Traffic: A Comparative Study between "Looking Ahead" and "Looking Behind"},
  author = {Shuai Li and Haotian Zheng and Jiawei Wang and Chaoyi Chen and Qing Xu and Jianqiang Wang and Keqiang Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.01625},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

This paper has been accepted by 26th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems ITSC 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:12:17.592Z