Modelling merging behaviour joining a cooperative adaptive cruise control platoon

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) has shown great potential in improving freeway capacity. Although the benefit of CACC is obvious, its potential side effects are not yet well studied. One of the major factors that have been overlooked is merging behaviour. A driving simulator study has been recently conducted at the Federal Highway Administration of the United States and reveals that there is unique driving behaviour when joining and leaving a CACC platoon. Unlike the conventional merging model which is a passive decision action, merging into a CACC platoon is a proactive action. Without simulating this unique behaviour, any simulation evaluation on CACC is biased. To improve the validity of future CACC simulation evaluation, this research constructs a merging model. The model consists of two parts: the longitudinal trajectory model and the merging duration prediction model. The model was constructed for both human manual driver and CACC automated controller. The evaluation of the proposed model shows that the model is 96.5% accurate in terms of merging duration prediction and 95.2% accurate in terms of speed prediction.