Micro-Simulation of Truck Platooning with Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control: Model Development and a Case Study

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) systems have the potential to improve traffic flow and fuel efficiency, but these effects are challenging to estimate. This paper reports the development of a micro-simulation model to represent these impacts for heavy trucks using CACC when they share a freeway with manually driven passenger cars. The simulation incorporates automated truck-following models that have been derived from experimental data recorded on heavy trucks driven under CACC, adaptive cruise control (ACC), and conventional cruise control (CC). The simulation includes other behavioral models for lane changing, lane change cooperation and lane use restrictions for trucks to better capture real-world traffic dynamics. The paper explains the calibration of the simulation method for a 15-mile urban freeway corridor with heavy truck traffic and significant congestion. Simulation results for different market penetration rates show that truck CACC improved traffic operations for trucks in terms of vehicle miles traveled, average speed, and flow rate. In addition, truck CACC did not adversely affect passenger car operations and in some locations it even produced considerable improvements in the general traffic conditions.