Faster Clearing of Congestion on Expressways using Advanced Adaptive Cruise Control System

Abstract

If the current adaptive cruise control systems(hereafter referred to as ACC) is fitted to vehicles running on expressways, the occurrence of congestion will be relieved by maintaining the appropriate following distance. However, it does not have the function of appropriately controlling starting and following of a vehicle in congestion, so it is considered that once congestion has occurred, ACC is not useful for faster clearing of the congestion. Therefore, in this research an advanced ACC is proposed in which the function of starting and following is added to conventional ACC, and an estimate of the extent to which congestion would be relieved by installing this to vehicles was made based on current traffic data. The results indicate that, for example, when 25% of vehicles are installed with advanced ACC, the congestion volume would be relieved by about 40%. This shows that faster clearing of congestion can be achieved by increasing the use of advanced ACC.