Inconsistency of AV Traffic Flow Impact in Literature, Lessons learned from Adaptive Cruise Control

Date and Time: Monday, July 18: 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Location: Pacific

Fabrizio Minarini

Senior Expert vehicle safety , European Commission Joint Research Centre

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) promise to significantly improve road traffic. To a certain extent, this situation is similar to the expectations at the end of the last century about the positive effects that the introduction of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems would have had on motorway traffic. The parallelism is interesting because ACC equipped vehicles represent the first level of vehicle automation and are now widely available on the market. In this light, studying ACC impacts can help to anticipate potential problems related to its widespread application and to avoid that AVs and CAVs will lead to the same problems.
The presentation introduces to the results of a large scale experimental campaign involving ACC vehicles, which has allowed to quantify their impacts on motorway driving and compare them with the original expectations and the underlying assumptions made to justify them. The presentation concludes with some possible recommendations to avoid that what we see today for ACC vehicles will not happen in 10-20 years for AVs

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Fabrizio Minarini has a 25 years work experience with the European Commission. He is a transport economist that in the years specialized in vehicle safety technologies in particular Driver Assistance Systems. Fabrizio worked more than 10 years in this field handling project funding and project management in Framework programs 5; 6 and 7 where he was in charge of the Intelligent Car Initiative of the European Commission. After other 10 years of work in the field of people and administrative management, in December 2018 Fabrizio came back to research into Vehicle Safety, ADAS and Autonomous Vehicles at the JRC in Ispra Italy, where he is Senior expert responsible for the development of a program on vehicle safety research and compliance testing.

PRESENTATION FILE