Adaptive Cruise Control: A Behavioral Assessment of Following Traffic Participants Due to Energy Efficient Driving Strategies

Abstract

Improvement of vehicle safety and driving comfort have been the main objectives of driver assistance systems. Because of the general need to reduce the fuel consumption, the scope of driver assistance systems has been enlarged. Today, Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems are developed which realize a more energy efficient driving style. However, energy optimal driving may lead to a trade-off between energy efficiency, vehicle safety and driving comfort. For example long coasting phases might irritate following drivers and provoke them to approach below the safety distance or overtake the ego-vehicle. This raises the question, how far energy optimized ACC affects following traffic and how the trade-off can be optimized to reach a higher acceptance. Within this work, a system to assess the driving behavior of following vehicles is developed and validated. The system is used to study the behavior of following traffic participants due to energy efficient ACC driving strategies. The results show that the median of the time gap between the following vehicle and ego-vehicle is significant lowered when driving with energy efficient ACC in comparison to driving manually. Whereas, the time to collision shows no significant difference between ACC and manually driven. At last, different concepts are presented which try to find an optimum between efficiency, safety and driving comfort.