The 22nd COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals (CICTP 2022)

Emerging techniques like connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication may alleviate bottlenecks on highway on-ramps. This paper proposes a method using CAVs to solve the merging control problem. An improved state transition algorithm is proposed to determine the optimal passing sequence in different merging scenarios. A repair transformation is implemented to make discrete heuristic optimization algorithms suitable for this kind of problem. An algorithm memory procedure is proposed to avoid repeated calculation and improve operation efficiency. Simulation studies were conducted using trajectory data exported from SUMO. The study showed reduced time consumption by 22% on average, while eliminating some unstable situations. Compared with the First-Come-First-Serve strategy, the proposed method can decrease time consumption from 5.16% to 30.05% while traffic flow varies from 200veh/(lane∙h) to 1600veh/(lane∙h). The study showed that the proposed method is scientific and reasonable even under the high level of traffic demand.