Communication Latency and Speed-Dependent Minimum Time Headway for Connected Heavy Road Vehicle Collision Avoidance

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems in heavy commercial road vehicles (HCRVs) have become necessary with the increasing contribution of HCRVs to road accident fatalities, where human factors form the major contributor. Collision avoidance systems can help in reducing fatalities through automated braking when required. This study focused on the development of a framework for the computation of the minimum time headway, for a Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication-based collision avoidance system for HCRVs, that must be maintained through automated braking to avoid a collision. The framework, as well as the developed Collision Avoidance Algorithm (CAA), considers critical attributes of an HCRV such as significant load variations and brake actuator dynamics. Further, the time headway formulation varies with the initial longitudinal speed and considers communication latency. Experiments were conducted in a Hardware-in-Loop test setup to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed formulations. It was observed that the incorporation of communication latency and initial longitudinal speed explicitly in the time headway formulation maintained the desired final spacing between the vehicles, over a range of communication latencies and various host vehicle longitudinal speeds, which was not the case when the above factors were not considered.