Rear-End Crash Mitigation Benefits of an Automated Highway System

The authors estimate the safety benefits offered by an automated highway system. This is done by comparing a fully automated highway with a hypothetical baseline highway and assuming that the two are subject to the same set of environmental intrusions and failures. Using these assumptions the paper estimates a lower bound on the percentage reduction in the number of rear-end crashes that occur on highways. The argument relies on some probabilistic analysis and some prior work on the design of automated vehicle following systems. Disturbance propagation effects in an automated vehicle string are considered