Assessing the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles. A Freeway Scenario

In the next decades, road transport will undergo a deep transformation with the advent of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), which promise to drastically change the way we commute. CAVs hold significant potential to positively affect traffic flows, air pollution, energy use, productivity, comfort, and mobility. On the other hand, there is an increasing number of sources and reports highlighting potential problems that may arise with CAVs, such as, conservative driving (relaxed thresholds), problematic interaction with human-driven vehicles (inability to take decisions based on eye contact or body language) and increased traffic demand. Therefore, it is of high importance to assess vehicle automated functionalities in a case-study simulation. The scope of this paper is to present some preliminary results regarding the impact assessment of cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) on the case-study of the ring road of Antwerp, which is responsible for almost 50% of the traffic and pollution of the city. Scenarios with various penetration rates and traffic demands were simulated showing that coordination of vehicles may be needed to significantly reduce traffic congestion and energy use.