The Impact of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control on Traffic-Flow Characteristics

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is an extension of ACC. In addition to measuring the distance to a predecessor, a vehicle can also exchange information with a predecessor by wireless communication. This enables a vehicle to follow its predecessor at a closer distance under tighter control. This paper focuses on the impact of CACC on traffic-flow characteristics. It uses the traffic-flow simulation model MIXIC that was specially designed to study the impact of intelligent vehicles on traffic flow. The authors study the impacts of CACC for a highway-merging scenario from four to three lanes. The results show an improvement of traffic-flow stability and a slight increase in traffic-flow efficiency compared with the merging scenario without equipped vehicles