The Impact of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control on Traffic-Flow Characteristics

TLDR

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) extends ACC by enabling vehicles to exchange wireless information, allowing them to follow at closer distances with tighter control. This paper investigates the impact of CACC on traffic‑flow characteristics. The study uses the MIXIC traffic‑flow simulation model to analyze CACC effects in a highway‑merging scenario reducing lanes from four to three. Results show that CACC improves traffic‑flow stability and slightly increases efficiency compared to scenarios without equipped vehicles.

Abstract

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is an extension of ACC. In addition to measuring the distance to a predecessor, a vehicle can also exchange information with a predecessor by wireless communication. This enables a vehicle to follow its predecessor at a closer distance under tighter control. This paper focuses on the impact of CACC on traffic-flow characteristics. It uses the traffic-flow simulation model MIXIC that was specially designed to study the impact of intelligent vehicles on traffic flow. The authors study the impacts of CACC for a highway-merging scenario from four to three lanes. The results show an improvement of traffic-flow stability and a slight increase in traffic-flow efficiency compared with the merging scenario without equipped vehicles