Shared Use of Dedicated Lanes by Connected and Automated Buses and Private Vehicles: A Multi-Green-Wave Signal Control Approach

Abstract

In the initial phase of implementing connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technology, the coexistence of human-driven vehicles (HVs) and CAVs is anticipated for the foreseeable future. While dedicated CAV lanes are recognized as an effective solution to enhance traffic safety and efficiency in mixed traffic scenarios, it faces the challenges of road resource wastage, especially at low CAV penetration rates.

Therefore, this study proposes a novel concept of a shared CAV lane for both connected and automated buses (CABs) and private CAVs and develops a multi-green-wave control approach for arterials to achieve space–time coordination in heterogeneous traffic. The two-dimensional traffic coordination aims to improve the service level of CABs and enhance overall traffic efficiency. A three-scale framework is established to integrate the control problems at the lane, intersection, and arterial levels. With the deployment of CAV lanes, lane-specified flow distribution control problems are investigated at the lane level, and a dedicated phase is designed to provide exclusive right-of-ways for CAVs and jointed with an online conflict-free control strategy at the intersection level. Building upon this, a multiple green-wave design is developed for heterogeneous traffic at arterials, to take full exploit of the space–time resources of both CAV lanes and regular lanes and further improve traffic efficiency.

To address the challenges of large-scale and complicated-structure optimization and enable real-time implementation, a hierarchical solution method is proposed. The original problem is decomposed into sub-problems, which can be efficiently solved with an approach to relax the bounding constraints among them. Simulation experiments conducted on an arterial in Singapore validate the performance of the proposed methods.

The results demonstrate that the proposed two-dimensional coordination strategy significantly improves traffic efficiency compared to other classic counterpart strategies, reducing the average travel delay for CABs, private CAVs, and HVs by at least 20.4%, 37.4%, and 21.4%, respectively.

Biography

Dr. Qiang Meng is a Provost Chair Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering Singapore. An internationally recognized transportation scholar, he has held several leadership roles at NUS, including Founding Director of the NUS Guangzhou Research Translation and Innovation Institute (2022–2025), Co-Director of the LTA–NUS Transportation Research Centre, and Director of the Centre for Transport Research. His research focuses on urban mobility modelling and optimization, shipping and intermodal freight transportation, and quantitative risk assessment, establishing him as a leading authority in transportation and logistics systems.

He has published over 300 papers in top journals, with 23,798 citations and a citation rate of 92 (Google Scholar). He was ranked among the world’s top 2% scientists in logistics and transportation by Stanford University (2019–2025). He has served as co-editor-in-chief of Transportation Research Part E and associate editor of Transportation Research Part B and Transportation Science. According to ScholarGPS Highly Ranked Scholars™ 2024, he is ranked within the top 0.05% globally, placing 5th (lifetime) and 4th (past five years) in transport research.

He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Best Paper Award of Omega (2023), EASTS Best Paper Awards (2019, 2021), and the INFORMS TSL Best Paper Award (2020). His honors also include election as Fellow of the Academy of Engineering Singapore (2022), the Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professorship (2017), HKUST Outstanding Alumni Award (2016), WCTR Best Paper Prize (2013), and the Singapore MOT Minister’s Innovation Award (2009), reflecting his significant contributions to transportation and logistics research.

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Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg.