Safety Analysis of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control in Vehicle Cut-in Situations

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is a cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) function, which especially when used in platooning applications, possess many expected benefits including efficient road space utilization and reduced fuel consumption. Cut-in manoeuvres in platoons can potentially reduce those benefits, and are not desired from a safety point of view. Unfortunately, in realistic traffic scenarios, cut-in manoeuvres can be expected, especially from non-connected vehicles. In this paper two different controllers for platooning are explored, aiming at maintaining the safety of the platoon while a vehicle is cutting in from the adjacent lane. A realistic scenario, where a human driver performs the cut-in manoeuvre is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the controllers. Safety analysis of CACC controllers using time to collision (TTC) under such situation is presented. The analysis using TTC indicate that, although potential risks are always high in CACC applications such as platooning due to the small inter-vehicular distances, dangerous TTC (TTC < 6 seconds) is not frequent. Future research directions are also discussed along with the results.