A study on the effective road capacity and the modified road capacity: new evaluation parameters for traffic flow evaluation

In this paper effective road capacity and modified road capacity are proposed as new parameters for traffic flow evaluation. By using these parameters, possible impacts of an inter-vehicle communications network under autonomous cruising and platooning are evaluated. These evaluations are carried out using the interchange highway road traffic flow simulator developed by the authors. It is shown that an inter-vehicle communications network is effective for improving the modified road capacity