Using Cooperative ACC to Form High-Performance Vehicle Streams

PATH has been studying the traffic impacts of adaptive cruise control (ACC) and cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) systems for many years.  From 2014 to 2017 PATH conducted this research under the sponsorship of the FHWA Exploratory Advanced Research Program, with cost sharing from the California Department of Transportation.  The reports posted here describe the technical results of this research.  One of the important and unique elements of this research was the use of mathematical models of the vehicle following dynamics of ACC and CACC vehicles derived directly from experiments on full-scale vehicles, making these models significantly more realistic than the models that have been used in prior studies.  The videos posted on this page show some of the experiments that PATH has conducted on CACC systems.