In the merging area of urban expressway, the probability of accidents is high due to the high frequency of lane changing and merging behavior of vehicles. Advanced connected and automated vehicles technology provides the communication capacity between vehicles and infrastructure, and provides new ideas to solve the problem of high accident rate in merging area. The purpose of this paper is to propose an merging assistant strategy for vehicles in urban expressway merging area under connected vehicle environment, to reduce lane changing behavior in merging area, and improve the safety and traffic efficiency. In the proposed strategy, by sensing the vehicle information on the main road and the ramp, the vehicles in the outer lane of the main road are guided in advance to perform more reasonable lane changing behavior, thereby the spontaneous lane changing behaviors of the main road vehicles in the merging area are reduced. By using the secondary development interface of VISSIM, with help of Visual Basic and MATLAB, the simulation platform of the connected vehicles strategy is established. The results show that the strategy proposed in this paper can effectively reduce the delay of the overall traffic flow in the merging area and improve the traffic efficiency.

CICTP