Seminar with Dr. Biagio Ciuffo

Requiem on the positive effects of commercial Adaptive Cruise Control on motorway traffic and recommendations for future Automated Driving Systems

Date: 13 April 2021
EU Time: 15:00-16:00

Attend the online seminar upon pre-registration

Abstract
Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) promise to significantly improve road traffic . To a certain extent, this situation is similar to the expectations at the end of the last century, about the positive effects that the introduction of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems would have had on motorway traffic. The parallelism is interesting because ACC equipped vehicles represent the first level of vehicle automation and are now widely available on the market. In this light, studying ACC impacts can help to anticipate potential problems related to its widespread application and to avoid that AVs and CAVs will lead to the same problems.

Only a few test-campaigns had been carried out studying the ACC impacts under real-world driving conditions in quantitative terms. To bridge this gap, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission has organized a number of experimental campaigns involving several ACC-equipped vehicles to study different implications of their widespread. In this context, the present paper summarizes the outcomes of a test campaign involving 10 commercially available ACC-equipped vehicles. The test campaign has been executed in two different test-tracks of the ZalaZONE proving ground, in Hungary. The tests have been carried out at low-speeds (30-60 km/h) and have involved platoons of vehicles of different brands and different powertrains, which were tested in a variety of vehicle orders and with different settings of their ACC systems. Test results have been used to derive information about the properties of the different ACC systems, to study their string stability, to study the effect of ACC systems on traffic flow, and to draw inference about the possible implications on energy consumption and traffic safety.

Results confirm the previous findings in terms of string instability of the ACC and highlight that in the present form, ACC systems will possibly lead to higher energy consumption and introduce new safety risks when their penetration in the fleet will increase. However, they also highlight that the materialization of the above findings for AVs depends on the operational logic that manufacturers will adopt during the implementation phase. Therefore, results suggest that functional requirements to guarantee string stability and in general to not disrupt the normal flow of traffic should be introduced both for ACC and and for any automated system that will be placed on the market in the future.

Resume

Biagio Ciuffo received the Ph.D. degree in transportation engineering from the Department of Transportation Engineering of the University of Napoli Federico II in 2008. Then he held a three-year Post-Doctoral position at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy, working at the sustainability assessment of traffic and transport related measures and policies. He is now an Official of the European Commission working for the Directorate for Energy, Transport, and Climate of the JRC where he leads the research group on Smart Mobility and the Living Lab for Future Mobility Solutions currently being setup in the Ispra site of the JRC.

Biagio Ciuffo has published more than 100 scientific reports and scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings in transportation engineering. Among the others, he is one of the main authors of the JRC Report on the Future of Road Transport which analyses the wide implications of a connected, automated, low-carbon and shared mobility. With his work, he has supported the technical development and implementation of several EU legislations concerning the reduction of CO2 emissions from road transport.

Biagio Ciuffo is also Deputy Editor in Chief for the IET Journal on Intelligent Transport Systems and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and serves as reviewer for the most important journals in the transportation field.

For his research activities on traffic simulation he was awarded with the 2012 Greenshields Prize and with the 2020 and 2013 Prize of the SimSub Committee all from the Transportation Research Board of the US National Academy of Science.

Biagio Ciuffo