Using Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) to Form High-Performance Vehicle Streams

This research identifies the operational concepts for managing cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) vehicle maneuvering and traffic flows. This includes approaches for grouping the CACC vehicles, ranging from ad-hoc to centrally coordinated strategies, and the incentives that could be used to facilitate the vehicle clustering, both operational and financial. These are particularly important at low market penetrations, when the CACC vehicles are likely to be widely separated. The dissolution of CACC strings is also discussed, since this needs to be done carefully to avoid adverse traffic impacts. While the main focus is on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) CACC for use on limited access highways, strategies for infrastructure to vehicle (I2V) CACC and for both V2V and I2V CACC on signalized arterials are also considered. Connected Cruise Control (CCC), which has been developed as a driver-advisory transitional strategy to lead toward CACC in the Netherlands, is also discussed.