TRAFFIC MICRO-SIMULATION IN REALISTIC ROAD SCENARIOS OF COOPERATIVE ADAPTIVE CRUISE CONTROL

Improve existing infrastructures is a crucial theme about transport systems, due to many reasons, which range from the traffic congestion and environmental issues, including also, for instance, safety and land use. Continuous technology development brings many interesting ideas to this topic, and the role of ADAS – Advanced Driver Assistance Systems is promising. ACC – Adaptive Cruise Control and CACC – Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control belong to the ADAS family of devices, which deal closely with autonomous driving, one of the most currently widespread topics in this field of research. ACC and CACC systems enforce the automatic control of the vehicle longitudinal motion, even if driver can get it back whenever he decides to. Acceleration and speed control rely on intervehicular gaps, interaction and real time communication either between other vehicles or with the infrastructure itself. This may open the doors for ameliorating vehicles and drivers’ behavior and for improving the efficiency of some traffic management strategies. In this thesis, first there is a brief description of how ACC and CACC work, and several applications of those systems are presented. Later on, traffic simulation is introduced, with particular regard to microsimulation, since this tool plays a key role in the evaluation of both real and hypothetical traffic scenarios: different functionalities and plans of action about that are discussed and utilized. In the two following chapters, microsimulation software is adopted for implementing the action of ACC and CACC devices and evaluating if and how those have an impact in global traffic flow parameters of a road network. Finally, a co-simulation framework is outlined, in which different types of software work together for managing vehicles behavior, to pursuit an effective, safe and comfortable motion, which is achieved thanks to the help brought by telecommunication systems and vehicle dynamics.