LAUSR

Recently developed efficient driving schemes usually solve a predictive optimization problem or determining the vehicle control input, and at the expense of high computational cost, they improve the overall traffic flows and individual driving performances on urban roads. This paper presents a more practical technique for automated vehicles’ predictive driving by extending the existing adaptive cruise control (ACC) scheme with a look-ahead functionality. Such a look-ahead driving scheme (LDS) predicts the states of the preceding vehicle at an adaptive look-ahead time step and, with negligible computation costs, computes the vehicle control input more circumspectly for efficient driving in urban traffic. The proposed LDS is evaluated in typical urban traffic at the signalized intersections by observing the intersection utilization, flowing characteristics, and individual vehicles’ fuel efficiency. Furthermore, we also evaluate the influences of the LDS-vehicles’ penetration rates on overall traffic performances at various traffic volumes.