Realistic Car-Following Models for Microscopic Simulation of Adaptive and Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Vehicles

Adaptive cruise control (ACC) and cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) are important technologies for the achievement of vehicle automation, and their effect on traffic systems generally is evaluated with microscopic traffic simulations. A successful simulation requires realistic vehicle behavior and minimal vehicle collisions. However, most existing ACC-CACC simulation studies used simplified models that were not based on real vehicle response. The studies rarely addressed collision avoidance in the simulation. The study presented in this paper developed a realistic and collision-free car-following model for ACC-CACC vehicles. A multiregime model combining a realistic ACC-CACC system with driver intervention for vehicle longitudinal motions is proposed. This model assumes that a human driver resumes vehicle control either according to his or her assessment or after a collision warning asks the driver to take over. The proposed model was tested in a wide range of scenarios to explore model performance and collision possibilities. The testing scenarios included three regular scenarios of stop-and-go, approaching, and cut-out maneuvers, as well as two extreme safety-concerned maneuvers of hard brake and cut-in. The simulation results show that the proposed model is collision free in the full-speed-range operation with leader accelerations within −1 to 1 m/s2 and in approaching and cut-out scenarios. Those results indicate that the proposed ACC-CACC car-following model can produce realistic vehicle response without causing vehicle collisions in regular scenarios for vehicle string operations.