The Impact of Predictive Cruise Control on Traffic Flow and Energy Consumption

A vehicle Predictive Cruise Control system has been developed to improve the fuel efficiency of vehicle and traffic flow performance based on the asymmetric traffic theory. The Predictive Cruise Control system consists of fourparts: (1) Deceleration-based Safety Surrogate Measure, (2) Adaptive Cruise Control, (3) Multi-Vehicle Measurement, and (4)Predictive Cruise Control. Adaptive Cruise Control basically decides the acceleration/deceleration action based on the estimated deceleration-based safety surrogate measure of the first leader vehicle. Then, Predictive Cruise Control adjusts the acceleration/deceleration action based on the multi-vehicle measurements, which represenst the future traffic condition of the subject vehicle. The developed system is tested by simulating the real vehicle trajectories from the NGSIM data and comparing the results with real following pattern. It was found that the newly proposed Predictive Cruise Control system can contribute to energy consumption and traffic flow performance because it can effectively suppress the shockwave from the downstream and remove the unnecessary deceleration and acceleration action.