Requiem on the positive effects of commercial adaptive cruise control on motorway traffic and recommendations for future automated driving systems

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) promise to significantly improve road traffic. To a certain extent, this situation is similar to the expectations at the end of the last century about the positive effects that the introduction of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems would have had on motorway traffic. Only a few test-campaigns had been carried out studying the ACC impacts under real-world driving conditions in quantitative terms. To bridge this gap, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission has organized a number of experimental campaigns involving several ACC-equipped vehicles to study different implications of their widespread. In this context, the present paper summarizes the outcomes of a test campaign involving 10 commercially available ACC-equipped vehicles. Results confirm the previous findings in terms of string instability of the ACC and highlight that in the present form, ACC systems will possibly lead to higher energy consumption and introduce new safety risks when their penetration in the fleet increases. However, they also highlight that the materialization of the above findings for AVs depends on the operational logic that manufacturers will adopt during the implementation phase. Therefore, results suggest that functional requirements to guarantee string stability and in general to not disrupt the normal flow of traffic should be introduced both for ACC and for any automated system that will be placed on the market in the future.

CIUFFO Biagio;  MATTAS Kostantinos;  MAKRIDIS Michail;  ALBANO Giovanni;  ANESIADOU Aikaterini;  HE Yinglong;  JOSVAI Szilard;  KOMNOS Dimitrios;  PATAKI Marton;  VASS Sandor;  ZSOLT Szalay; 

2022-03-10

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

JRC124154

0968-090X (online),   

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X21003144?via%3Dihub,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC124154,   

10.1016/j.trc.2021.103305 (online),