Impact of automatic and semi-automatic vehicle longitudinal control on motorway traffic

Intelligent cruise control (ICC) is the basic and most promising one with regard to traffic flow safety and efficiency, driving comfort and early implementation. This function can be implemented by a headway controller. This strategy ensures the stability of strings of equipped vehicles provided the target headway is larger than one second, and can be implemented in an autonomous manner. Consequently, no explicit platoon management involving vehicle communications is required. Microsimulation of such a system in automatic mode and in mixed traffic on a motorway has shown a very positive impact on the traffic flow