The authors consider autonomous intelligent cruise control (AICC), a technology for driver convenience, increased safety, and smoother traffic flow. AICC also has been proposed for increasing traffic flow by allowing shorter intervehicle headways. Because an AICC-equipped vehicle operates using only information available from its own sensors, there is no requirement for communication and cooperation between vehicles. This format allows gradual market penetration of AICC systems, which makes the technology attractive from a systems implementation standpoint. The potential flow increases when only a proportion of vehicles on a highway are equipped with AICC were examined, and theoretical upper limits on flows as a function of pertinent variables were derived. Because of the limitations of the theoretical models, a simulator was used that models interactions between vehicles to give detailed information on achievable capacity and traffic stream stability. Results showed that AICC can lead to potentially large gains in capacity only if certain highly unrealistic assumptions hold. In reality, the capacity gains from AICC are likely to be small. (A)
Samenvatting