Effect of automated driving in road network environment

Automated driving could reduce driving workload, enhance traffic safety, and improve traffic efficiency and has become a research hotspot in recent years. Numerous studies have looked at the effect of automated driving on capacity, mostly focused on highway driving. However, travel behavior occurs in the road network, which consists of a large number of different scenarios, such as expressway, merging/diverging area, trunk road, branch road, signalized intersection, and is different from highway driving. To evaluate the effect of automated driving more realistically, this paper simulates road network level, and investigates the influence of automated driving under different conditions. Results show that implementation of automated driving does not necessarily improve efficiency. Meanwhile, the effectiveness is related to multiple factors. Vehicle-infrastructure co-operation should be considered in future application, so as to make better use of spatial-temporal resource of road networks.