A car-following model considering the effect of electronic throttle opening angle under connected environment

Abstract

This study proposes a new car-following model considering the effect of electronic throttle opening angle to capture the characteristics of connected autonomous vehicular traffic flow. The proposed model incorporates the opening angle of electronic throttle into the full velocity difference (FVD) model by assuming that the information of electronic throttle dynamics is shared by vehicles through vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The stability condition of the proposed car-following model is obtained using the perturbation method. Numerical experiments are constructed on three scenarios, start, stop, and evolution processes, to analyze the vehicular traffic flow characteristics of the proposed model. The results of numerical experiments illustrate that the proposed car-following model has a larger stable region compared with FVD model. Also, it demonstrates that the proposed car-following model can better present the characteristics of connected and autonomous vehicular flow in terms of the smoothness and stability with respect to the space headway, position, velocity, and acceleration/deceleration profiles.