California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

In this project, we design two new Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems based on driver comfort, safety, vehicle following performance, environmental and traffic flow characteristics considerations. A new variable time headway rule is proposed and used to meet these considerations. Analysis and simulations are used to evaluate and compare the two designs. The first ACC system (referred to as ACC01) incorporates two controllers: one for speed tracking and one for vehicle following. The second ACC system (referred to as ACC02) treats the vehicle following task as a special speed tracking task and incorporates more intelligence in dealing with disturbance rejection, smooth response and safe vehicle following without affecting travel time. It provides better transient performance than ACC01, and can attenuate oscillations in the speed response of the preceding vehicle. It has also been shown that ACC02 provides better fuel economy and emission results than ACC01. The ACC02 design will be used for subsequent studies in a continuation project.