On the Progressive Introduction of Heterogeneous CACC Capabilities

Can we introduce Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) technologies on the road without separated road infrastructures? This simple question is often latent in works dealing with cooperative driving, especially in feasibility analysis of cooperative driving. As of today, the question has indeed received no definitive answer in the literature because it is hard to model analytically heterogeneous systems or to experiment with them. This work helps understanding how vehicles interact among each others when they do not run a single, a-priory defined, CACC algorithm, but rather each vehicle adopt its own one. We introduce the concept of mixed platoon, i.e., a string of vehicles where more than one CACC algorithm is used, and we experiment with mixed platoons in silico to study how the mixture of CACC algorithms affects efficiency and safety. For instance we analyze scenarios where we progressively introduce homogeneous and mixed platoons among standard Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) vehicles, quantifying the positive or negative effects on traffic efficiency and safety induced by the introduction of CACC technologies as a function of their penetration rate. The obtained results encourage additional research on the topic, starting from theoretical analysis of mixed platoons down to performance evaluations of actual implementations.