On Partial Adoption of Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communication: When Should Cars Warn Each Other of Hazards?

Gould, Brendan T; Brown, Philip N.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are an emerging and highly impactful technology on today's roads. When assessing the performance of AVs, it is useful to study their improvement relative to common metrics such as fuel economy/emissions, safety, and congestion. But metrics of the vehicle's performance alone may not be complete; an AV that is affecting and reacting to a smart traffic light, for example, may improve its own performance, but may cause the same intersection to degrade the performance of other vehicles around the AV. Similar concerns arise in nearly all AV topics: platooning, light pre-emption, lane tracking, etc. Thus, the assessment of the vehicle's impacts on surrounding traffic is important, possibly even more important than the improvements enabled on the AV alone. But what boundary, or factors, define the vehicles, equipment, etc. “surrounding” an AV? The goal of this work is to characterize the boundary of vehicles “surrounding” an AV, referred to as Region of Influence, or ROI. Specifically, this work focuses on the problem that considering a perturbation is exerted into a traffic system, how far in time and space the perturbation from an AV’s decision can influence the surrounding system’s behavior. To achieve the goal, we utilized AIMSUN, a microscopic traffic simulator, to perform baseline and perturbed simulations. The ROI was evaluated by comparing trajectories of traffic surrounding the ego vehicle using different metrics, including difference in trajectories, Euclidian distance, rate of change of Euclidian distance, total number of lane changes over the whole simulation space versus time and total number of lane changes over the whole simulation time versus distance to ego vehicle. The results show that the ROI can be viewed from different perspectives using these metrics, and it is dependent on speed variance of the traffic.

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