title: Evaluation of the impacts of cooperative adaptive cruise control on reducing rear-end collision risks on freeways.
abstract: Although plenty of studies have been conducted recently about the impacts of cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) system on traffic efficiency, there are few researches analyzing the safety effects of this advanced driving-assistant system. Thus, the primary objective of this study is to evaluate the impacts of the CACC system on reducing rear-end collision risks on freeways. The CACC model is firstly developed, which is based on the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM). Then, two surrogated safety measures, derived from the time-to-collision (TTC), denoting time exposed time-to-collision (TET) and time integrated time-to-collision (TIT), are introduced for quantifying the collision risks. And the safety effects are analyzed both theoretically and experimentally, by the linear stability analysis and simulations. The theoretical and simulation results conformably indicate that the CACC system brings dramatic benefits for reducing rear-end collision risks (TET and TIT are reduced more than 90%, respectively), when the desired time headway and time delay are set properly. The sensitivity analysis indicates there are few differences among different values of the threshold of TTC and the length of a CACC platoon. The results also show that the safety improvements weaken with the decrease of the penetration rates of CACC on the market and the increase of time delay between platoons. We also evaluate the traffic efficiency of the CACC system with different desired time headway.
authors.affiliation: School of Transportation, Southeast University, 2 Si Pai Lou, Nanjing, 210096, PR China. Electronic address: yeli@seu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Ye
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: School of Transportation, Southeast University, 2 Si Pai Lou, Nanjing, 210096, PR China. Electronic address: haowang@seu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Hao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Transportation, Southeast University, 2 Si Pai Lou, Nanjing, 210096, PR China. Electronic address: wangwei_transtar@163.com.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Transportation, Southeast University, 2 Si Pai Lou, Nanjing, 210096, PR China. Electronic address: luxing@seu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Lu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Xing
authors.affiliation: Department of City and Regional Planning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, New East Building, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, United States. Electronic address: shanwen@live.unc.edu.
authors.forename: Shanwen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Transportation, Southeast University, 2 Si Pai Lou, Nanjing, 210096, PR China. Electronic address: weixy163@163.com.
authors.forename: Xueyan
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wei
mesh_terms: D000063:Accidents, Traffic / Q000517:prevention & control*; D001331:Automation; D001334:Automobile Driving; D003654:Deceleration; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011482:Protective Devices; D012306:Risk; D012449:Safety
keywords: Collision risk; Cooperative adaptive cruise control; IDM; Platoon; Safety