Control Procedures and Exchanged Information for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control of Heavy-Duty Vehicles Using Broadcast Inter-Vehicle Communication

The Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control system (CACC) is an enhancement of the Adaptive Cruise Control system (ACC) that uses inter-vehicle communication to realize safe cruising at shorter inter-vehicle distance. To effectively communicate via broadcasting, a vehicle must identify the ID of the preceding vehicle, and extract that vehicle's information from the information sent by surrounding vehicles. In addition, the vehicle should ideally be able to reference information from other members of the platoon. In this manner, the system can evolve towards platooning with a very short inter-vehicle distance. On the other hand, if CACC is to acquire the same flexibility as ACC, the vehicle should handle common driving maneuvers such as lane-change of the preceding vehicle, cut-in of vehicles, and change of control mode of the preceding vehicle. Given the above requirements, this paper proposes control procedures and inter-vehicle communication schemes for implementing CACC of heavy-duty vehicles developed as part of the NEDO's Development of Energy-Saving ITS Technologies project.