Improving and enhancing the flow of information between the driver, his vehicle and the road side is one means to improve safety and efficiency for the individual driver and for traffic as a whole. The Intelligent Cruise Control system, ICC, is an on-board system assisting the driver to adapt his speed to the desired one as well as to the distance and velocity to preceding vehicles. By adding short range communication, SRC, the ICC equipped vehicles can be linked to the road side and thereby to the local traffic manager. Safety and traffic flow can be improved by transmitting relevant pre-information to vehicles and drivers so that appropriate actions are taken at the correct time and location. Better traffic management can be achieved by making use of the equipped vehicles as probe cars which report data using the SRC link. In ARENA, Test Site West Sweden, a system concept has been realised in real traffic environment at two sites. Evaluation of technology and traffic effects have been done with a number of test drivers. The tests and results of the ARENA test sites are presented briefly. (A)
Abstract