Communicating with two vehicles immediately ahead boosts traffic capacity sixfold in connected autonomous vehicle platoons

作者：Shiteng Zheng, Rui Jiang, Xiqun Chen, Junfang Tian, Xiao Han, Ruidong Yan, Bin Jia, Xiaobo Qu, Zhenhua Li, Lan-Da Gao, Fang Zhang, Dezhao Zhang, Ziyou Gao · 发表于：Communications Engineering · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1038/s44172-025-00500-8 · 被引用次数：4 · 研究领域：Traffic control and management、Transportation Planning and Optimization、Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety

Addressing urban congestion through enhanced traffic capacity has emerged as a critical objective for connected autonomous driving technologies. An irredundant communication connectivity topology is essential for ensuring the high efficiency and stability of the traffic system, which has not been fully validated due to the scarcity of real-world tests. Motivated by this fact, this paper deploys a connected autonomous vehicle platoon without relying on the information of a platoon leader to preserve the possibility of extending the platoon in future practical applications. The study is supported by both real-world experiments and simulations, where the following vehicles communicate with the two vehicles immediately ahead. The simulation extends the experimental results to several typical scenarios. The results demonstrate that such a communication structure largely enhances traffic capacity and stability, highlighting the effectiveness of connected autonomous vehicles in managing complex traffic environments. This work gains valuable insights into the sixfold traffic capacity improvement through connected autonomous driving. Enhancing traffic capacity to alleviate urban congestion is a key objective for connected autonomous driving. Shi-Teng Zheng and colleagues report a sixfold traffic capacity improvement enabled by a communication topology involving only the two vehicles ahead.