Effects of ACC and FCW on Speed, Fuel Consumption, and Driving Safety

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are widely expected to deliver a major contribution to the improvement of driving comfort as well as road safety. An insight into the benefits of ITS is an important ingredient in the deployment of ITS. Assessing these benefits is one of the research goals within the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission. Field Operational Tests (FOT) have emerged as an important research methodology for assessing the impact of ITS on driver behavior and performance, traffic safety, traffic efficiency as well as the environment. Within the euroFOT project, a large scale field test that involves approximately 1000 instrumented vehicles on the road all over Europe the impact of eight selected ITS function is tested. Most of these vehicles have one or more ITS applications on board, including continuously operating ones like Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Forward Collision Warning (FCW). This paper describes the method applied for the FOT to assess the impact of the ACC and FCW. The euroFOT approach has some similarities to existing FOTs but includes novel aspects to handle specific limitations and conditions of the FOT and the available data. The paper further describes the final results of the data analysis based on the predefined hypotheses to answer the research questions of the project.