Modeling Uncertainties for Automated and Connected Vehicles in Mixed Traffic

The advent of automated vehicles (AVs) and connected automated vehicles (CAVs) creates significant uncertainties in infrastructure planning due to many unknowns, such as performance variability and user adaptation. As technologies are still emerging with low market penetration, limited observational data hinder validation and escalate prediction uncertainty. This study addresses these gaps by employing diverse vehicle models and wide performance ranges in Aimsun microsimulations. It involved three AV/CAV car-following models with the default Gipps human-driven vehicle (HDV) model. We evaluated the performance of a mixed fleet in three well-calibrated real-world corridor models, including two highways and one freeway. Vehicle parameters in Aimsun are commonly drawn from a corresponding truncated normal distribution with fixed mean, min, and max values. However, to account for future uncertainty and heterogeneity, our AV/CAV models were given truncated normal distributions with variable means for important parameters to incorporate broader performance ranges. The variable means are drawn from intervals with uniform probability, and some of the interval extended below HDV values to account for scenarios where riders opt for smoother rides at the cost of traffic flow. Recognizing that precise future prediction is unattainable, we aimed to establish traffic performance boundaries that define best- and worst-case scenarios in a mixed-fleet environment. Enumerating all possible combinations is impractical, so a refined optimization algorithm was employed to expedite solution discovery. Our findings suggest that AVs/CAVs, even with conservative performance parameters, can improve traffic operations by reducing peak delays and enhancing travel time reliability. Freeways benefited more than arterial roads, especially with full CAV penetration, although the authors speculate this could create bottlenecks at off-ramps. The added capacity may induce traffic demand that is difficult to estimate. Instead, we conducted a demand sensitivity analysis to gauge additional traffic accommodation without worsening delays. Compared to point predictions, establishing the range of possibilities can help us future-proof infrastructure by considering uncertainties in the planning process. Our framework can be adopted to test alternative models or scenarios as more data becomes available.