Beyond Simulated Drivers: Evaluating the Impact of Real-World Car-Following in Mixed Traffic Control

Human-driven vehicles can amplify naturally occurring perturbations in traffic, leading to congestion and consequently increased fuel consumption, higher collision risks, and reduced capacity utilization. While previous research has highlighted that a fraction of Robot Vehicles (RVs) can mitigate these issues, they often rely on simulations with simplistic, model-based Human-driven Vehicles (HVs) during car-following scenarios. Diverging from this trend, in this study, we analyze real-world human driving trajectories, extracting a wide range of acceleration behaviors during car-following. We then incorporate these behaviors in simulation where RVs from prior studies are employed to mitigate congestion, and evaluate their safety, efficiency, and stability. Further, we also introduce a reinforcement learning based RV that utilizes a congestion stage classifier neural network to optimize either "safety+stability" or "efficiency" in the presence of the diverse human driving behaviors. We evaluate the proposed RVs in two different mixed traffic control environments at various densities, configurations, and penetration rates and compare with the existing RVs.