Vehicle Dynamics Model for Estimating Maximum Light-Duty Vehicle Acceleration Levels

Abstract

A vehicle dynamics model for predicting maximum light-duty vehicle accelerations for use within a microscopic traffic simulation environment is presented and validated. The research also constructs a database of unconstrained vehicle acceleration data for 13 light-duty vehicles and trucks. With the use of the field data, the proposed vehicle dynamics model is validated and compared with a number of state-of-the-art vehicle acceleration models, including the Searle model and the dual-regime, linear decay, and polynomial models. The advantages of the proposed model include its ability to predict vehicle behavior accurately with readily available input parameters and its flexibility in estimating acceleration rates of both large and small vehicles on varied types of terrain.