Autonomous traffic-jam clearance using a frugal adaptive cruise control strategy

Traffic congestion is one of the most important issues to be addressed in transport management. Since building new transport infrastructure is no longer an appropriate option in many regions, strategies need to be sought to arrange traffic in a more efficient manner. A device that suggests itself for this purpose and that is already available in many vehicles is adaptive cruise control. Adaptive cruise control is a device that automatically regulates vehicle acceleration according to desired speed and distance to the front vehicle. It is obvious that such a device can be actively used to help arranging vehicles more efficiently and minimize congestion. With this in mind, scholars have suggested to actively attune some of the driver's ACC settings to the current traffic situation when it becomes critical. Previous work in this direction, however, proposed strategies that relied on static and imposed classifications of traffic situations and static and imposed setting adjustments. Although the effectiveness of such strategies could be proven for a particular record once the classifications and setting adjustments were calibrated, it remains unclear whether these strategies also work in other settings. In this study, we propose a novel ACCassisted driving strategy that attunes ACC parameters in an individual and dynamic way and on a continuous scale. The goal was to create a strategy that is frugal but yet effective across different types of traffic situations. In this study, we compare the proposed strategy with a classification-based one for a closed two-lane freeway system with an on-ramp via simulations. We could show that under the proposed strategy traffic speed could be increased by more than 600 %, stop-and-go patterns could be significantly reduced, but driving comfort significantly increased. In contrast, the tested classification-based strategy was only slightly effective. We conclude that further tests with empirical freeway records are required, but that such an effort could be worthwhile.