Car-Following Characteristics of Adaptive Cruise Control from Empirical Data

Computer-driven vehicles will behave differently from human-driven vehicles due to changes in perception abilities, precision control, and reaction times. These changes are expected to have profound impacts on capacity, yet few models of automated driving are based on empirical measurements of computer-driven vehicles in real traffic. To this end, this paper investigates characteristics of an early form of longitudinal control automation, a commercially available adaptive cruise control (ACC) system driven in real traffic. Two car-following models were calibrated to a vehicle with ACC. First, the Intelligent Driver Model was reformulated to comply with ACC design standards then calibrated to match speed and range data from the test vehicle. The vehicle with ACC was found to decelerate less severely than predicted by the model when tested in severe braking and unimpeded acceleration scenarios. Second, the Wiedemann 99 model was calibrated because it is the default car-following model in the traffic microsimulation software program Vissim and can therefore be implemented cheaply and quickly in sophisticated models of roadways worldwide. Four parameters of the Wiedemann 99 model were measured directly from field observations of the test vehicle: standstill distance, start-up time, unimpeded acceleration profile, and maximum desired deceleration. Simulation results in Vissim were found to match the adaptive cruise control in unimpeded acceleration tests. These findings will benefit researchers and modelers seeking more accurate models of car-following behavior with adaptive cruise control and automated longitudinal control. (C) 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.