Enhanced AHS Safety Through the Integration of Vehicle Control and Communication

In fiscal year 2002/2003 we finished the study of the effect of vehicle-vehicle/vehicle-roadside communication on the performance of adaptive cruise control (ACC) systems. Two simulation studies were finished. The first is a single ACC vehicle simulation using MATLAB/SIMULINK. A cut-in scenario and a braking scenario are tested. Communication greatly saves control effort in the former scenario, while it has little effect in the latter. The other work simulates ACC controlled highway merging using SHIFT language. The results show the beneficial effects of communication in terms of the braking effort, the waiting-to-merge queue length, and the main lane traffic shock wave caused by merging.