A Study on Car Following Models Simulating Various Adaptive Cruise Control Behaviors

This study aims to develop car following models which simulate various adaptive cruise control (ACC) behaviors for a microscopic traffic simulator. There is a need for a microscopic traffic simulator to evaluate the impact of ACC penetration on highway traffic conditions. If the method of modeling of the simulator follows ACC technology as it is in the real world, the update frequency will be in millisecond order. This may result in an unexpected increase in the calculation time and often spoil the practical use of the simulator. To avoid this situation, it is necessary to develop a car following model which can simulate ACC with sufficient accuracy for impact assessment and which works in sub-second frequency, which is common for many microscopic traffic simulators. This paper outlines the Intelligent Driver Model and its derivations, which have many preferable features. Those model equations are modified to simulate three types of ACC behaviors which retain distance gap, time gap and time headway, and we verified their behaviors through computational platoon experiments with four cars. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York.