Fundamental diagrams of commercial adaptive cruise control: Worldwide experimental evidence

Abstract

Experimental measurements on commercial adaptive cruise control (ACC) vehicles are becoming increasingly available from around the world, providing an unprecedented opportunity to study the traffic flow characteristics that arise from this technology. This paper adds new experimental evidence to this knowledge base and presents a comprehensive empirical study on the ACC equilibrium behaviors via the resulting fundamental diagrams. We find that, like human-driven vehicles, ACC systems display a linear equilibrium spacing-speed relationship (within the range of available data) but the key parameters of these relationships can differ significantly from human-driven traffic depending on input settings. At the minimum ACC headway setting, equilibrium capacities in excess of 3500 vehicles per hour are observed, together with an extremely fast equilibrium wave speed of 100 kilometers per hour. These fast waves are unfamiliar to human drivers, and may pose a safety risk. The results also suggest that ACC jam spacing can be much larger than in human traffic, which reduces the network storage capacity.