An empirical study on fuel consumption of commercial automated vehicles

Increasing commercial vehicles are equipped with automated driving features. Adaptive cruise control, a critical longitudinal control system of commercial automated vehicles (AVs), may have significant impacts on fuel consumption. To investigate the impacts, this paper collected high resolution trajectory data of commercial AVs with different operating scenarios, speed ranges, and headway settings on the highway system. The AVs' fuel consumption was calculated by several state-of-the-art or classical vehicle fuel consumption models. From empirical analyses, we found that as the AV headway setting increases, the corresponding fuel consumption decreases. Also, we found that as the speed of AV traffic increases, the impacts of AV headway settings on fuel consumption decrease. Moreover, we compared the fuel consumption of AVs and human driven vehicles (HVs). We found that for the same settings, the AVs always require less fuel consumption than the HVs. Following these findings, a set of managerial insights were provided into relevant stakeholders for future AV traffic.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the impacts of adaptive cruise control, a critical longitudinal control system of commercial automated vehicles, on fuel consumption. By collecting trajectory data of commercial AVs on the highway system, the study finds that increasing the AV headway setting decreases fuel consumption, and the impacts of headway settings on fuel consumption decrease as the speed of AV traffic increases. Moreover, the study compares the fuel consumption of AVs and human driven vehicles, and concludes that AVs require less fuel consumption for the same settings.