Harmonized traffic stream in urban environment based on adaptive Stop&Go cruise control and its impact on traffic flow

Enhanced vehicle flow, reduction and eventually elimination of traffic congestion have been attractive issues for the past two decades in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) domain. Several Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) intended to lower down the driver workload, reduce congestion and improve safety, have been developed during this period and introduced on the market. Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is one of the first systems that lead towards enhanced traffic flow and safety, but it is limited on higher speeds. For low speeds a Stop and Go system has been introduced as an upgrade of ACC. The research presented in this paper is focused on urban traffic environment. Due to increased driver workload, inattention, weather and several side activities like SMS, CD and radio change, site seeing etc. vehicles movement through urban intersections gets wavy effect. In these conditions, intensive acceleration and deceleration are imminent and lead towards decreased driver concentration and decreased road capacity and flow. This problem imposes the meaning of harmonized vehicle start and flow through intersections without unnecessary acceleration and deceleration and its impact on the traffic flow. In order to obtain qualitative measures a virtual model of harmonized traffic stream is built in Matlab. The results from these simulations are compared with real traffic stream. The comparison shows that the harmonized traffic stream has significant positive influence on the urban traffic flow.