Comparing Driving Behavior for Manual, Conventional and Automated Cruise Control Driving Behavior in Car-Following by Scenario

Every year more than six million crashes occur in the USA, killing over 40.000 people and causing more than three millions of injuries [7]. A major part of these crashes are rear-end collisions. Therefore the U.S. Department of Transportation has put a lot of effort in fostering the development of rear-end collision avoidance systems by funding governmental, academic and industrial research groups in the last ten to fifteen years. The intelligent cruise control field operational test (ICC FOT) [1, 4] represents an important milestone in this line of research. With its various findings and its big amount of recorded data it is a valuable means for evaluating the impact of automated cruise control systems (ACC) on driver performance. This paper addresses the safety-enhancing potential of the ACC system in the ICC FOT. For the comparison of manual, conventional cruise control (CCC), and ACC driving behavior in car-following scenarios during the ICC FOT a novel performance map [5] was applied. This map associates the exposed driving behavior with four driving states: low risk, conflict, near crash, and crash imminent. The transition boundaries between the low risk and conflict state and between the conflict and near crash state are based on the drivers’ braking and steering responses in last-second evasive maneuvers of test track trials [2]. For a complete evaluation, a theoretical boundary between the near crash and crash imminent states derived from vehicle dynamics will be introduced. Subsequently, by the means of this advanced driver performance map, an evaluation of the safe driving performance of different driver groups with and without ACC and CCC deployment will be shown. An analysis of the findings concludes this paper. * Corresponding Author