Impact of Autonomous Vehicles on Roundabout Capacity

Othmane Boualam, Attila Borsos, Csaba Koren and Viktor Nagy
Additional contact information
Othmane Boualam: Department of Transport Infrastructure and Water Resources Engineering, Széchenyi István University, Egyetem tér 1, 9026 Gyor, Hungary
Attila Borsos: Department of Transport Infrastructure and Water Resources Engineering, Széchenyi István University, Egyetem tér 1, 9026 Gyor, Hungary
Csaba Koren: Department of Transport Infrastructure and Water Resources Engineering, Széchenyi István University, Egyetem tér 1, 9026 Gyor, Hungary
Viktor Nagy: Department of Transport, Széchenyi István University, Egyetem tér 1, 9026 Gyor, Hungary

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 4, 1-14

Abstract: Studying the impact of AVs on our road infrastructure offers a lot of potential in the transportation domain; one of these issues is how capacity will be affected. This paper presents a contribution to this research area by investigating the impact of AVs on the capacity of single-lane roundabouts using a microsimulation model. For the development of the model, a roundabout situated in Győr (Hungary) was selected and field data on the roundabout geometric characteristics as well as traffic volumes were used. Simulations using Vissim were run for various scenarios based on varying input traffic volumes and market penetration rates of AVs to assess queue lengths. The highway capacity manual (HCM) roundabout model was used to estimate the capacity of the existing roundabout. Values of follow-up times and critical gaps were set to decreasing as the penetration rate of AVs increases. The results demonstrated that 20% and 40% AVs in the flow would increase leg capacities by about 10% and 20%, respectively. Furthermore, a reduction in excessive queue lengths was estimated and capacities and queue lengths were calculated by legs. It was found that these are highly influenced by the distribution of flows among legs, and the share of flows in various directions.

Keywords: roundabout capacity; autonomous vehicles; PTV Vissim; HCM capacity model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/4/2203/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/4/2203/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:4:p:2203-:d:749776

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().