Influence of cooperative-controlled driving in the traffic flow

This paper presents some preliminary results on the influence of vehicles equipped with cooperative adaptive cruise control algorithms to the traffic flow. The design of the controller consists in regulating a policy distance that depends on the longitudinal speed of the vehicle and, when available, the velocity of precedent vehicles. The behaviour of the proposed algorithms are tested in numerical simulations. Additionally, the influence of cooperative driving to traffic properties in heterogenous roads, i.e., with a variable (and randomly) presence of controlled-vehicles is analysed using a standard traffic simulator.