Novel Cooperative Collision Avoidance Model for Connected Vehicles

Connected vehicle technology exchanges real-time vehicle and traffic information through vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. The technology has the potential to improve traffic safety applications such as collision avoidance. In this paper, a novel cooperative collision avoidance (CCA) model that could improve the effectiveness of the collision avoidance system of connected vehicles was developed. Unlike traditional collision avoidance models, which relied mainly on emergency braking, the proposed CCA approach avoided collision through a combination of following vehicle deceleration and leading vehicle acceleration. Through spacing policy theory and nonlinear optimization, the model calculated the desired deceleration rate for the following vehicle and the acceleration rate for the leading vehicle, respectively, at each time interval. The CCA approach was then tested on a scaled platform with hardware-in-the-loop simulation embedded with MATLAB/Simulink and a car simulator package, CarSim. Results show that the proposed model can effectively avoid rear-end collisions in a three-vehicle platoon.