Developing A Novel Dynamic Bus Lane Control Strategy With Eco-Driving Under Partially Connected Vehicle Environment

Exclusive bus lane strategy is widely adopted in many cities to improve bus operation efficiency and reliability. With the development of connected vehicle technologies, the dynamic bus lane (DBL) strategy was proposed, with allowing general vehicles to share use of the bus lane to improve traffic efficiency in general purpose lanes (GPLs). Previous studies have rarely considered the eco-driving strategy of connected and automated vehicles/buses (CAVs/CABs) in GPLs under the mixed traffic conditions, and how to ensure bus priority with DBL control. In this study, a novel DBL control strategy was developed under the partially connected vehicle environment. A trajectory planning method while considering the joint effects of bus stop and signal phase for CAB was adopted, an eco-driving strategy for CAVs in GPL was proposed using a trigonometry trajectory planning method. And a novel DBL control method was established by integrated trajectory planning for both the CAVs and CABs to ensure bus operation priority. Numerical experiments were conducted to evaluate performance of the proposed novel DBL control in terms of travel time and energy consumption of general vehicles at the different levels of CAV market penetration rates (MPRs). Results indicated that about 16%-42% energy savings can be achieved with MPR varying from 20% to 100%, and the travel time can be improved by about 4%-10%. Meanwhile, sensitivity analysis was conducted to quantify the impacts of key parameters, including vehicle target speeds, heterogeneous traffic flow, random arrival interval of cars, position of bus stop, traffic volume in GPLs and buffer length at the stop line of signalized intersections.