With the development of technology, platoons of intelligent and connected vehicles (ICVs) will join regular vehicles on roads, and the characteristics of the traffic flow will change accordingly. In this paper, the traffic flow configurations and the spatial distributions of various types of vehicles are analyzed, when the mixed traffic flow is in equilibrium. To model the mixed traffic flow with platoons of ICVs, the intelligent driver model and the PATH laboratory-calibrated cooperative adaptive cruise control model are introduced for capturing the car-following behavior in this study. Then, analytical methods for the stability of mixed traffic flow are developed. The results of the sensitivity analysis demonstrate that ICVs can improve the stability of the mixed traffic flow under a critical speed. However, if this critical speed is exceeded, an increase in the number of ICVs may degrade the stability of the mixed traffic flow. Moreover, this critical speed decreases as the maximum platoon size increases.

CICTP