New approach to evaluating macroscopic safety of platooned vehicles based on Shockwave theory

This paper proposed a new approach to evaluating safety of vehicle platooning based on the Shockwave theory defined in the field of traffic engineering. Macroscopic traffic variables such as traffic flow "q" and density "k" are proved to be transformed into the inverse of time headway and that of spacing between vehicles. This conversion showed that the conventional Shockwave speed is equivalent to the speed difference between longitudinal consecutive car-following vehicles weighted by the spacing of both leader and follower. The authors referred this microscopic wave propagation as the car-following Shockwave and evaluated the performance through a simple case study. The proposed formula of car-following Shockwave is finally extended to the derivation of mathematical model to evaluating macroscopic safety of vehicle platooning.